The American spirit in education: a chronicle of great teachers

THE CHRONICLES
OF AMERICA SERIES
ALLEN JOHNSON
ITOR

THE

AMERICAN SPIRIT IN
EDUCATION

EDWIN E. SLOSSON

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

AD,KK1 /I

mi

TEXTBOOK EDITION

THE CHRONICLES

OF AMERICA SERIES

ALLEN JOHNSON

EDITOR

GERHARD R. LOMER

CHARLES W. JEFFERYS

ASSISTANT EDITORS

FRANKLIN'S BOOK SHOP, 1745

From the painting by Ferris. In the Ferris Collection of American
Historical Paintings

Copyright, J. L. («. Ferris

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT
IN EDUCATION

A CHRONICLE OF

GREAT TEACHERS

BY EDWIN E. SLOSSON

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
TORONTO: GLASGOW. BROOK & CO.
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD

LA 205-
Sc

REPLACING

£*<+ PSfc

Copyright, 1921, by Yale University Press

CONTENTS

I. SCHOOL DAYS IN EARLY NEW

ENGLAND Page 1

II. SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND " 22

III. SCHOOLS OF THE MIDDLE AND

SOUTHERN COLONIES " 34

IV. THE COLONIAL COLLEGE " 46

V. FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDU
CATION " 65

VI. JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION " 78

VII. WASHINGTON AND NATIONAL EDU
CATION " 94

VIII. SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC " 104

IX. HORACE MANN AND THE AMERICAN

SCHOOL " 124

X. DE WITT CLINTON AND THE FREE

SCHOOL " 141

XI. THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT " 155

XII. THE RISE OF THE STATE UNIVER
SITY " 168

XIII. CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA " 181

XIV. THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDU

CATION " 207

vii

viii CONTENTS

XV. THE MORRILL ACT AND WHAT CAME

OF IT Page 221

XVI. WOMEN KNOCKING AT THE COL
LEGE DOOR " 233

XVII. THE NEW EDUCATION " 253

XVIII. THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY " 273

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE " 287

INDEX " 291

ILLUSTRATION

FRANKLIN'S BOOK SHOP, 1745

From the painting by Ferris. In the
Ferris Collection of American Historical
Paintings. Copyright, J. L. G. Ferris. Frontispiece

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN
EDUCATION

CHAPTER I

SCHOOL DAYS IN EARLY NEW ENGLAND

It being one chiefe project of that ould deluder Sathan to keepe
men from the knowledge of the Scriptures ... It is therefore
ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord
hath increased them to the number of 50 householders, shall ap
point one within their towns to teach all such children as shall
resort to him to write and reade. — Massachusetts School Law, 1647.

THE origin of the American public school must be
sought in New England, not because the schools of
Massachusetts were the first in time — for Vir
ginia, if not New Netherland, may dispute that
primacy — but because New England has been
the teacher of the nation's teachers. The legisla
tors who framed the early school laws for the newer
States of the South and the West found models

in the codes of Massachusetts and Connecticut;

i

2 AMERICAN SFIRIT IN EDUCATION

and to a remarkable extent the first text-books
used in every State and Territory of the Union
came from New England publishers. Harvard and
Yale and even the smallest colleges of New Eng
land have attracted students not only from all
parts of America but from all quarters of the globe.
Scholars, teachers, divines, and college graduates
by the thousand have been numbered among the
sons of New England who joined the great tide of
migration from the Atlantic seaboard to the fron
tier. Whether the western limit of American settle
ment was in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Kansas,
or Colorado, the schoolmaster and the schoolma'am
from " down East " were there as true volunteers on
the firing-line of civilization to see that the younger
generation was not permitted to grow up without
the knowledge considered essential in that day.

Though the educational leadership of America is
now held by no one section, the pioneer work of the
men and women of New England can never lose its
historical importance. In the story of the New
England school may be read in brief the story of
public education in America. A description of dis
trict school, academy, or college in New England
may stand with very little change for thousands of
similar institutions throughout the country.

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 3

Of the early settlers in America the colonists of
Plymouth were second to none in their zeal for the
education of their children, but their poverty and
the arduous task of turning a wilderness into a
commonwealth inevitably postponed for several
years the establishment of schools. Children were
at first commonly taught at home until the colo
nists found themselves in a position to set up both
elementary and grammar schools. There was no
adequate public provision for instruction until
1670, when the General Court of the colony en
acted a law "granting all such profits as may or
shall accrue annually to the colony from fishing
with nets or seines at Cape Cod for mackerel, bass,
or herring, to be improved for and towards a free
school in some town in this jurisdiction, for the
training up of youth in literature for the good
and benefit of posterity." The town of Plymouth
promptly accepted this opportunity and built a
schoolhouse which served also as a home for the
teacher. Within a few years of the establishment
of a system of public instruction in Plymouth
the colony was merged with Massachusetts and
became subject to the laws of the larger colony.

Massachusetts Bay, although a later settlement
than Plymouth, was the first New England colony to

4 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

make its schools a public charge. Compared with
the scanty numbers and resources of the men of Ply
mouth, the colony of Massachusetts seemed from
the beginning strong and prosperous. Among its
first settlers were men of some wealth and much learn
ing. Such men were quick to see the need of teachers
for their children and were equally prompt to supply
it. In 1635 a town meeting in Boston voted to hire
a schoolmaster and thus founded the Boston Latin
School, which has brought an honorable record down
to our own day. This institution was supported
largely by the generosity of the wealthier citizens,
but a few years later a school was established at
Dorchester and maintained entirely by a public
tax. Other Latin schools were soon built in the
more progressive townships, and in 1642 an ordi
nance of the colony made education compulsory.

The law of 1642 called to public attention the
failure of many parents and guardians to train the
children in their charge in learning and labor. It
gave the town authorities the power to punish by
fines those who refused to give an account of the
instruction received by their children, "especially
of their ability to read and understand the prin
ciples of religion and the capital laws of this coun
try." In case a child's education were persistently

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 5

neglected, the officials of the town had the right to
apprentice him in some fit occupation where his
improvement would be better looked after. If this
ambitious ordinance could have been enforced to
the letter, Massachusetts would never have had a
boy or girl within her borders who could not read
and write, pursue a useful trade, and pass an
examination in civics. But it was one thing to
require instruction and another to provide it.
Not every parent could furnish the means for pri
vate teaching, and not all the towns were equally
forward in establishing free schools.

To remedy the lack of adequate facilities for
learning, the colony in 1647 made it obligatory on
every township of fifty householders to employ
some one competent to teach reading and writing.
Every township of a hundred families was com
pelled in addition to establish a grammar school
capable of preparing boys for college. The schools
thus established were not necessarily free, since
fees were sometimes charged, nor were children
compelled to attend if their parents preferred to
give them private instruction. But three main
principles were established by this early law which
have characterized American education ever since :
that the duty of public instruction is one which no

6 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

community, however small and poor, may be per
mitted to evade; that the government of the public
schools in matters of detail is lodged not in some dis
tant central authority but in the immediate neigh
borhood where the schools are situated ; and that the
elementary schools are distinct from the secondary
schools which prepare for college or university.

Such promising beginnings, however, did not
lead to rapid and continuous progress. Some
towns found it cheaper to pay the fines imposed
upon them for neglect of the law than to hire a
schoolmaster and openly disregarded the ordinance
of 1647. Many of the later immigrants to Massa
chusetts had less of that zeal for learning which
distinguished the first settlers; and, being busy
practical men engaged in trade or agriculture, they
did not see the need of Latin for their children.
Apart from these discouragements within, Indian
raids on the backwoods settlements proved to be an
other obstacle to learning, the strength of which can
readily be appreciated from the following pathetic
petition from Dover, New Hampshire l :

That whereas the said town is one of the most exposed
towns in this Province to the insults of the Indian
enemy, and also whereas by an act of the General As-

1 Walter H. Small, Early New England Schools (1914), p. 51.

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 7

sembly of this Province the said town of Dover
(amongst others) is obliged by said act to keep and
maintain a grammar school, and whereas the circum
stances and situation or settlements of the inhabitants
of said town lying and being in such a manner as it is,
the houses being so scattered over the whole township
that in no one place six houses are within call, by which
inconveniency the inhabitants of said town can have
no benefit of such grammar school, for at the times fit
for children to go and come from school, is generally
the chief time of the Indians doing mischief, so that
the inhabitants are afraid to send their children to
school, and the children dare not venture; so that the
salary to said schoolmaster is wholly lost to said town.

Within a few years of the first settlements, all
the New England colonies except Rhode Island
made public provision for education. Newport
and Providence gave generous donations of land
for the establishment of town schools, but in Rhode
Island before 1800 there was no general law author
izing towns to maintain public schools. The back
wardness of the little colony in matters of education
was due largely to the fact that, since there was no
union between Church and State, the Government
was not concerned, as it was in Massachusetts, to
sustain an educated ministry. Education was re
garded in Rhode Island, just as it was in England
and in most of the English colonies outside the

8 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

region of Puritan influence, as a need to be met by
private initiative. New Hampshire followed the
school system of Massachusetts, and Maine, as a
part of Massachusetts throughout the colonial
period, shared the same laws. In her Constitution
of 1777 Vermont enjoined upon the Legislature the
duty of establishing a school or schools in each
town "for the convenient instruction of the youth."
Connecticut has an educational record rival
ing that of Massachusetts. Schools were well
established in Hartford before the middle of
the seventeenth century, and soon schools were
made compulsory throughout the entire colony.
The selectmen of each town were required to see
that none "shall suffer so much barbarism in
any of their families, as not to endeavor to teach
by themselves or others their children and appren
tices so much learning as may enable them per
fectly to read the English tongue, and knowledge
of the capital laws." Towns of fifty household
ers were obliged to maintain teachers of reading
and writing, and towns of a hundred household
ers were required to establish a grammar school.
New Haven colony, before it was united with the
towns on the Connecticut, enacted similar laws.
In 1672 six hundred acres of land were assigned to

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 9

each county in Connecticut to endow a grammar
school in the "county town."

The common schools which taught pupils to
read and write English early supplanted the "dame
schools" and other private schools for primary
instruction, and they were, on the whole, well kept
up in all the English colonies where they had been
established by public authority. But the Latin
grammar schools were essentially exotic. In all
features except their public support they were in
tended to resemble the secondary schools of Eng
land and as a result were strikingly ill adapted to
frontier conditions. The general tendency of the
rural townships to neglect the school laws affected
the grammar schools much more adversely than
the elementary schools. In many places only three
or four youths cared to study Latin or prepare for
college, and the taxpayers were consequently in
dignant at having to support a schoolmaster of so
little value to the community. Although the gram
mar schools were not supposed to admit boys
who could not already read and write English,
public opinion often compelled the teacher to take
pupils at a very early age and coach them for
grammar school work by giving them the necessary
elementary instruction.

10 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

The grammar schools prospered most in Mas
sachusetts, especially in the towns within a con
venient distance of Harvard College. But even in
Massachusetts this type of school was ultimately
replaced by the private academy or preparatory
school. Today in the system of public education
the public high school serves as the connecting
link between the elementary school and the uni
versity and thus occupies a place similar to that of
the old Latin grammar school; but the old rigid
classical course of study and the old paternal over
sight of the pupils is now found only in certain
private boarding schools.

The Latin schools in their day gave very thor
ough instruction in the limited field of classical
learning. Boys were drilled for several hours a
day in the complexities of Latin grammar and were
encouraged, and frequently compelled, to speak
Latin instead of English in the classroom. Some
times the master was a scholar of distinguished
attainments, a graduate of Harvard College or
even of one of the English universities. Nothing
is more surprising in the records of colonial times
than the amount of conscientious, laborious, pro
fessional service which a New England town could
thus receive in exchange for a few pounds a year

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 11

and the right to pasture a cow and live in a dilapi
dated schoolhouse. Of course the Puritan school
master found a certain compensation for his meager
salary in the social prestige accorded to his pro
fession and frequently enhanced in New England
by its association with religion. Many teachers
were also ministers, and all, whether clergy or lay
men, were required to be "sound in the faith" and
"of sober and good conversation."

The fame of the more successful teachers of
colonial times has come down to the present day.
The Boston Latin School was fortunate enough to
have as its head for thirty-eight years the famous
Ezekiel Cheever, the friend and instructor of Cot
ton Mather, who said of him after his death at the
age of ninety-four : "He had been a skilful, painful,
faithful schoolmaster for seventy years, and had
the singular favor of heaven, that though he had
usefully spent his life among children, yet he was
not twice become a child, but held his abilities, in
an unusual degree, to the very last." As principal
of the Boston Latin School he received "sixtie
pounds p. an. for his service in the schoole out of
the towne rates, and rents that belong to the
schoole and the possession and use of ye schoole
house." He was the author of a text-book of

12 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

elementary Latin which came into general use in
the colonies and was the first important school book
published in America. Elijah Corlett made a re
markable record as teacher at Cambridge. Here
he taught both Indians and colonists, but his in
come from fees was so small that on several occa
sions the town authorities were compelled to come
to his relief. Both these veteran teachers were
celebrated by Cotton Mather in a couplet which
shows that their work was at least appreciated
even if it was almost unpaid:

'Tis Corlett's pains, & Cheever's, we must own,
That thou, New England, art not Scythia grown.

The school in Roxbury which, according to this
same authority, eventually produced more scholars
"than any town of its bigness, or, if I mistake not,
of twice its bigness, in all New England," was es
tablished by the efforts of the Reverend John Eliot,
the Apostle to the Indians.

The teachers of the elementary schools received
in general even less for their labors than the school
masters of the grammar schools. Often they were
paid in commodities other than the scarce coined
money, and the form of payment varied with the
products of the town. In the country districts

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 13

grain was the staple compensation; Maine teachers
were often paid in lumber; Taunton at one time
paid in pig iron; and the town of Hingham in pails.
In some of the earliest contracts wampum, the
Indian shell money, is mentioned. Yet these
teachers who received their salaries in products
having a market were more fortunate than a later
generation forced to accept a depreciated paper
currency at its face value. The nominal salary of
the colonial teacher was increased by fees from
parents, small grants of land for pasturing and
gardening, exemption from taxation, and the right
to board around among the families of the town.
Lest the more penurious farmers begrudge the
visiting teacher a good meal, the town sometimes
paid a small sum to those who would agree to
board him for a few weeks.

The curriculum of the common schools may be
summed up in the four R's: Reading, 'Riting,
'Rithmetic, and Religion. Many of the earliest
school contracts do not mention arithmetic at all,
but the practical necessities of the settlers soon
forced this subject into the course of study. Writ
ing involved learning to cut and manipulate the
quill pen. Pupils provided the quills and brought
tbeir ink from home, as its manufacture was one

14 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

of the many arts of the colonial household. Read
ing and religion were combined in the school text
book, and a knowledge of the catechism was a
universal requirement.

The first and simplest of the school-books was
the horn-book, an English invention consisting of
a small board with a handle attached. To the
board was fastened a sheet of paper covered with
transparent horn to prevent the paper from be
coming soiled or torn. Through this necessary
protection the pupil could read the letters of the
alphabet, certain combinations of letters, such as
"ab eb ib," called the "syllabarium," the Lord's
prayer, and at the bottom the Roman numerals.
For more advanced children the chief text-book
down to the end of the colonial period was the
New England Primer, originally adapted from
English models but changing considerably in the
nature of its contents as it passed from edition
to edition.

The New England Primer began, like the horn
book, with the alphabet and syllabarium. Then
followed words for spelling, short sentences for
reading, and a series of rimed couplets illustrated
with very crude woodcuts for each letter of the al
phabet, beginning with the theological assertion,

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 15

In Adam's fall
We finned all,

and closing with the scriptural statement,

Zaccheus he

Did Climb the Tree

Our Lord to fee.

The religious flavor introduced thus early into
colonial education was further strengthened by the
inclusion of several prayers and hymns, the Shorter
Catechism, and another catechism bearing the title
Spiritual Milk for American Babes drawn from the
breasts of both Testaments for their soul's nourish
ment. There was also a woodcut of John Rogers
burning at the stake, with his wife and "nine small
children and one at the breast" viewing the sad
spectacle, to illustrate a poem written by that
martyr to his children. The last feature of the
Primer was an allegory of Youth yielding to the
temptations of the Devil. This text-book was in
use for a hundred and fifty years, and it is recorded
that one firm of printers sold 37,000 copies within
seven years. After the Revolution the New Eng
land Primer was gradually driven from the market
by Webster's more modern schoolbooks.

The schoolhouse was almost always built of wood

16 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and was likely to be in a ruinous condition. Some
times it was only a log cabin with one room, in
which the children were seated on long, unpainted
benches, with nothing before them but bare walls
and the teacher's desk. Usually the room was kept
sufficiently heated only at the expense of ventila
tion. A schoolmaster writing in 1681 thus de
scribes his schoolhouse: "The confused and shat
tered and nastie posture that it is in, the glass
broke, and thereupon very raw and cold; the floor
very much broken and torn up to kindle fires, the
hearth spoiled, the seats some burned and others
out of kilter, that one had well nigh as good keep
school in a hog stie as in it."1 The state of the
schoolhouse, however, varied according to the lib
erality of the town. In some places the schools
were kept in excellent repair, though in none of
them was there any suggestion of the modern idea
of making the schoolroom beautiful.

The schools were ungraded, although the lit
tle children just learning their letters usually sat
apart from the rest. The pupils studied at their
seats but, when called upon to recite, came to the
front of the room, gave the teacher the book, and

1 Clifton Johnson, Old- Time Schools and School-Books (1904),
p. 9.

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 17

rehearsed their lesson as well as possible from mem
ory. If the recitation fell very much below the
master's expectations, the usual result was a sound
flogging. The colonial school inherited the English
tradition of harsh discipline and even exceeded its
inheritance. Hot-tempered instructors were not
content with the traditional use of the ruler, birch,
and strap, but exercised their ingenuity in invent
ing new punishments. A disobedient or trouble
some boy might be compelled to stand in the corner
with a dunce's cap decorating his head, stay by the
hot stove during recess, hold out a heavy book at
arm's length until he was exhausted, have his nose
pinched with a sort of wooden clothespin, or sit on
the girls' side of the room — a punishment the
severity of which depended upon the point of view.
As a rule the more conscientious the teacher, the
worse time his pupil had. There was no attempt to
make study attractive, and most students followed
the road to learning only under bitter compulsion.
Girls were almost never admitted to grammar
school, although it was not at all uncommon for
a teacher to give them private instruction after
school hours. In the small common schools of ru
ral New England necessity often triumphed over
prejudice, and boys and girls had to be taught in

18 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the same room and at the same time. The teacher,
however, was very careful in such cases to seat the
girls and boys on opposite sides of the room. In
spite of the fact that the laws recognized the rights
of girls to at least elementary instruction, less than
forty per cent of the women whose names appear
on recorded deeds in Massachusetts during the
early part of the eighteenth century were able to
write their own signatures, the rest having to attest
by marks. x

Dame schools filled a useful place in providing
the first instruction of boys and sometimes the only
instruction of girls. In these very elementary pri
vate schools taught by women in their own homes
the little children learned to read from the horn
book and sometimes to do sums by making figures
on the sanded floor. Girls who remained long
enough in the dame school might learn to read,
write, cipher, sew, recite the catechism, and even
spell. Sewing in the dame schools and in more ad
vanced private schools was taught very largely by
the making of samplers. Some of these were simply
copies of the horn-book with decorated borders and
show that the sampler could teach reading, writing,

1 G. H. Martin, Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School
System (1894).

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 19

sewing, and piety in the same piece of work. The
smallest children might be given the letters of the
alphabet made in gingerbread and be permitted as
a reward to eat the letters which they could recog
nize. Some dame schools taught nothing but the
alphabet and were chiefly valued as safe places
where a busy mother could leave her youngest
children during part of the day. Although the
dame schools were ordinarily supported by small
fees from parents, in certain places the town
paid something toward their upkeep as a cheaper
alternative to establishing a common school.

As the frontier pushed farther westward, it be
came inconvenient for all the children in a spacious
rural township to go long distances to a single
school. The custom therefore grew up of moving
the school, or rather the master, from one part of
the township to another. The school would be
taught several weeks in one place and then be
moved on for the convenience of another group of
children, sometimes staying in each part of the
township for a length of time proportioned to what
the neighborhood paid in taxes. In the latter part
of the eighteenth century Connecticut and Massa
chusetts empowered the towns to divide themselves
into smaller districts for the purpose of managing

20 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the schools. The intention of the law was good,
for its aim was to secure educational facilities
for every part of each township, but it made the
schools more than ever dependent upon small
neighborhoods and resulted in mismanagement.

The law of 1789, which recognized in Massa
chusetts the district school system already estab
lished in fact by many of the towns, made other
interesting changes in the school laws of the State.
Towns of one hundred families were no longer
compelled, as formerly, to maintain a grammar
school. This requirement had, indeed, long been a
dead letter, and the law recognized existing facts
when it raised the limit to a hundred and fifty
families for a part-time grammar school and re
quired a full-time school only in towns of at least
two hundred families. All teachers were required
to have a college education or else present a cer
tificate of learning and good character from a min
ister of the gospel "well skilled in the Greek
and Latin language." Ministers and town officials
were authorized to inspect schools every six months
to see that they were properly conducted. Ele
mentary schools were required to teach arithmetic,
spelling, and "decent behavior," in addition to
reading and writing English. This law marks the

EARLY NEW ENGLAND 21

definite triumph of experience over expectation:
the common school system had firmly established
itself and the grammar school, in which the found
ers of New England placed their greatest hope
amid frontier conditions, had now all but perished.

es-

CHAPTER II

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND

You must urge upon the States-General that they should „_
tablish free schools, where children of quality, as well as of poor
families, for a very small sum, could be well and Christianly edu
cated and brought up. This would be the greatest and most use
ful work you could ever accomplish for God and Christianity, and
for the Netherlands themselves. — John of Nassau.

WHEN the Dutch planted their colony in the valley
of the Hudson, they were not constrained as were
the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay to devise a sys
tem of public instruction but found in the institu
tions of their fatherland a ready model. Indeed,
it is hardly too much to say that the Dutch colo
nists themselves did not establish schools but merely
accepted those provided by the authorities. So
slight was the effective control of the British Gov
ernment over the New England commonwealths
that they were virtually so many independent
republics allied to England by sentiment and tradi
tion. The colonists of New Netherland, on the

22

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND 23

other hand, were governed autocratically by offi
cials of the Dutch West India Company, whose
charter of 1629 required the patroons and colo
nists to support a minister, a schoolmaster, and
a "comforter of the sick." To maintain relig
ion and learning every householder and inhabit
ant was subject to tax, but the West India Com
pany furnished the schoolmasters and sometimes
contributed to their support.

It would, however, be unjust to infer that the
Dutch colonists were at all indifferent to the
schools established in New Netherland. On the
contrary, the records of the colony show how eager
the settlers were to have schools built and kept sup
plied with competent teachers. The Dutchmen,
many of them educated in the public schools of the
Netherlands, would have considered it criminal to
allow their children to go without similar advan
tages in their new home. But since most of the
colonists were tradesmen seeking new commercial
opportunities for themselves and their fellow-
countrymen, the type of education in which they
were most interested was a thorough ground
ing in the bread and butter subjects. Unlike the
settlers of Massachusetts and Virginia, the Dutch
colonists never founded a college and even had

24 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

to wait for some twenty years after elementary
schools had been started before they had a Latin
grammar school.

The city then called New Amsterdam was the
first Dutch settlement to enjoy a public school.
Adam Roelantsen, the first schoolmaster, opened
school probably in 1633. It must be confessed that
Roelantsen was far from being in all respects a
credit to his profession. Little is known about his
skill as a teacher, but it is a fact that he was con
stantly involved in lawsuits and frequently accused
of slander and disorderly conduct. After Roelant
sen abandoned his position, the school was con
tinued somewhat irregularly by a number of other
schoolmasters. For want of an adequate building
the teachers were often forced to keep school in
private houses or in public buildings intended for
other purposes. The pay which the teacher re
ceived was frequently insufficient to maintain him.
Sometimes the New Amsterdam school could
find no one who would consent to undertake its
charge, and the children were without schooling for
months at a time, though a few struggling private
schools shared with the public school the work of
instructing the children of the city.

New Amsterdam was not the only Dutch colonial

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND 25

town to support a public school. All of the other
towns and villages of any importance in New Neth-
erland established schools as soon as they were
populous enough to warrant the expense. Even
far-away New Amstel (now New Castle, Delaware)
was supplied with a Dutch teacher, although at
that time the majority of the townsmen were
Swedes. Only in the country districts and in the
poorer villages was public education not provided.
In the outlying settlements the difficulty of obtain
ing good schoolhouses and good teachers was even
greater than in New Amsterdam, and in spite
of every effort on the part of their parents many
children grew up without any regular schooling.

In 1652 a Latin school was started in what had
earlier been the "city tavern" of New Amsterdam,
but the experiment was very soon abandoned.
The colonists thereupon petitioned the West India
Company to send them some one competent to
teach Latin and other advanced studies. In their
appeal they pointed out that many of the citizens
desired for their children the advantages of a Latin
education, but that there was no place nearer than
Boston where this want could be supplied. In 1659
the West India Company in response to their ap
peal sent the learned Dr. Alexander Curtius to

26 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the colony as Latin schoolmaster. He received a
moderate salary, a house and garden, fees from his
pupils, and permission to practice medicine. Not
succeeding very well with his charge, however,
Dr. Curtius was soon replaced by the Reverend
^Egidius Luyck. The Latin school was largely
supported by the local authorities, although
part of the teacher's salary was guaranteed by
the Company.

The Dutch elementary schools in America
taught little except reading, writing, arithmetic,
and the catechism. Sometimes, as in the New Eng
land schools of the seventeenth century, even arith
metic was omitted from the course of study. But
religious instruction was never neglected; in fact,
after the English conquest many of the old Dutch
public schools continued their existence as private
parochial schools, still giving instruction in the
Dutch language to the descendants of the first
settlers. The change was the more easily made
because even under the Dutch regime these schools
had been in part supported by fees from well-to-do
parents who had children in attendance. A typical
teacher's contract, with one Evert Pietersen, as
signed him a salary of 36 florins a month.1 125

1 A florin is about forty cents in our coinage.

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND 27

florins for board, free house, a school building, and
free passage back to Holland at the conclusion of
his service. Parents whose children were at school
paid more or less according to whether the pupil
studied reading, writing, and ciphering, or only
reading and writing; but it was also stipulated that
"the poor and needy, who ask to be taught for
God's sake, he shall teach for nothing."1 Most of
the school-books were religious in character and,
though arithmetics and primers were not unknown,
the Bible, the catechism, and the psalm-book were
the chief readers in use. Girls as well as boys went
to the public school but sat apart from the boys
or, if possible, were taught in another room.

Nowhere in America did the schoolmaster com
bine more offices in one than he did among the
Dutch. The teacher was commonly both reader
and precentor in the church; frequently he was also
the sexton; sometimes he was the "comforter of the
sick," a ministration which blended religion and
medicine. Many of the school contracts specify
in minutest detail the incidental duties of the
schoolmaster even to the ringing of the church bell
and the provision of water for the baptism of in
fants. If these auxiliary occupations may have

1 KHpatrick, Dutch Schools of New Netherland, p. 68.

88 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

detracted a little from the scholarly dignity of the
teacher, they nevertheless enriched his purse with
much needed fees and increased his usefulness in
the eyes of the community. If long hours deserve
a good salary, the Dutch schoolmaster was cer
tainly not overpaid, for the school day began at
eight in the morning and lasted, with a noon recess
for lunch, till four in the afternoon. There was no
long vacation during the year, unless, of course, the
school was unable to find a teacher. There were,
however, festival holidays, and Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons were usually free.

Though the public school system of the Dutch
colonists may have been imperfect and inadequate
when judged by the standards of colonial Massa
chusetts, it was superior to anything that the newly
established English Government was ready to put
in its place. The English settlers practically ig
nored the Dutch establishment of public education
and sent their own children to private schools or
let them do without instruction — the custom not
only in England itself but in the majority of the
English colonies.

The people of New York, however, made a few
attempts to obtain some measure of public sup
port for the schools. In 1702 they passed a law

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND 29

authorizing the public support of a school teacher in
New York City to instruct "male children of such
parents as are of French and Dutch extraction as
well as of the English." This school lasted, it is
true, for only seven years, but in 1732 the income
from licenses issued to hawkers and peddlers was
granted by the Government to a school for teaching
Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and free scholar
ships were provided for twenty young men from
different parts of the colony. But this school, also,
had a brief existence.

More important than such slight and temporary
aid of popular education was the part which the
colonial Government played in the supervision of
private schools, even though this oversight was
more in the interest of religion than in the cause of
efficient instruction. No teachers might come from
England to teach in New York without the con
sent of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and no resi
dent of New York might open a school without
license from the Governor. These restrictions
gave the Church of England a favored position of
which it was not slow to take advantage. During
the eighteenth century the instruction of the poor
of New York came almost entirely under the care
of an Anglican missionary association known as

30 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts.

The activities of this Society were by no means
confined to New York but affected to some degree
the educational life of all the colonies. In New
England the strength of the Congregationalists
left little room for Anglican missionary effort, and
the completeness of the public school system dis
couraged the foundation of private charity schools;
but in spite of these handicaps some Church of
England schools were organized. In other parts of
America the Society had better fortune, particu
larly in New York, where the rapidly increas
ing and cosmopolitan population and the lack of
common schools offered a unique opportunity for
educational effort.

But the establishment of schools was a second
ary matter to the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel. Its chief aim was evangelical; its main
purpose, to convert the heathen Indians, to confirm
in the faith the adherents of the Church of England,
and to make headway against heresy and dissent.
But, like the Jesuits of old and the modern mission
aries to India or China, the missionaries of the S. P.
G., as it is familiarly known, soon discovered that
the only way to evangelize was to teach. In their

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND 31

charity schools they emphasized the catechism and
a thorough knowledge of the Anglican ritual, but
they also found it advisable to teach the children
"to write a plain and legible hand in order to the
fitting them for useful Employments; with as much
Arithmetick as shall be necessary to the same Pur
pose." The Society supported between five and
ten schools in the colony of New York up to the
time of the American Revolution and gave aid
to many others. In New York City the Trinity
Church charity school received help from the local
authorities as well as from the Society and at one
time held session in the City Hall.

The officers of the Society exercised great care
in selecting their missionaries. All had to be sound
in the faith and well-affected toward the existing
Government, and married schoolmasters usually
were required to take their wives with them to
America. Teachers were expected to send home
two reports a year of the progress of their work,
but this duty they frequently neglected, as ade
quate supervision was impossible when the central
organization was separated from its agents by the
width of the Atlantic. The Society kept its schools
supplied with generous donations of text-books, for
the most part of a purely religious character. In

32 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the early years of the eighteenth century the So
ciety devoted no small share of its efforts to the
instruction of the Iroquois Indians and the negro
slaves, but, as the colony became more populous
and settled, it shifted the emphasis more and more
from purely missionary activities to ordinary
school work. After an insurrection of the slaves in
1712 had been unjustly ascribed to the educational
work of the Society, the colonists looked with some
disfavor on the teaching of negroes, but the Society
did not entirely abandon its work.

The English made, on the whole, a creditable
educational record in New York. As a result of
private initiative and philanthropic effort, free
elementary education was provided for many chil
dren, some good secondary schools were established,
and a flourishing college was founded. But the
cardinal mistake of the English in not establishing
a public school system had baneful effects that out
lasted the colonial period. Free education became
synonymous with charity education, and the school
ing which the New England lad expected as a right,
the New Yorker received as a privilege to be bought
in the market by well-to-do parents or given as alms
to the poor. Such prominent educators as Presi
dent Johnson of King's College early advocated the

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND 33

public endowment of education, but it was not until
the middle of the nineteenth century that the battle
for the free school system was finally won.

Another obstacle which the friends of learning
encountered in New York, and one which was only
less formidable than the tradition that education
was a private rather than a public concern, was the
swamping of the commercial centers by incessant
immigration in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen
turies. Private educational agencies were quite un
able to cope with the growing problem of illiteracy,
especially when it was willful illiteracy. As early as
1713 Chaplain John Sharp of the royal army in New
York complained that "the city is so conveniently
Situated for Trade and the Genius of the people are
so inclined to merchandise, that they generally seek
no other Education for their children than writing
and Arithmetick. So that letters must be in a
manner forced upon them not only without their
seeking but against their consent." x It was just this
necessary element of compulsion that was lacking
in the school system of colonial New York, and the
results of this defect proved to be far-reaching.

1 W. W. Kemp, The Support of Schools in Colonial New York
by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts
(1912), p. 68.

CHAPTER III

SCHOOLS OF THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN
COLONIES

We press their memory too soon, and puzzle, strain and load
them with words and rules; to know grammar and rhetoric, and a
strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to
them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical and physical
or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would
be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course
of their life. To be sure languages are not to be despised or
neglected. But things are still to be preferred. — William Penn.

No colony was ever founded in a nobler spirit than
was the Quaker settlement planned by William
Penn in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Religious
toleration, fair dealing with the Indians, and the
instruction of all children in godliness, industry,
and learning were parts of the enlightened plan
projected by the founder and first proprietor. The
intentions of William Penn were seconded by the
settlers, who passed a law that all children should
be taught "so that they may be able to read the
Scriptures and to write by the time they attain to

34

MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES 35

twelve years of age; and that then they be taught
some useful trade or skill, that the poor may work
to live, and the rich if they become poor may not
want: Of which every County Court shall take
care." In 1683, the year in which this law was en
acted, Enoch Flower opened a school in Philadel
phia under the authority of the Provincial Council.
Six years later a Latin grammar school, which still
exists as the William Penn Charter School, gave the
Philadelphia children an opportunity for higher
education. To this school poor children were ad
mitted free, but those who could afford to do so
had to pay.

The Friends, or Quakers, resembled the Dutch
in their zeal for elementary education and their
comparative indifference to the college, though
not a few of the Quakers were themselves graduates
of English universities. Yet in an age which valued
the college chiefly as a means for training an edu
cated ministry, the Quakers on account of their
peculiar beliefs had less reason than others to set
much value on higher education. They believed
not that the clergy were an order of men set apart
from the community by superior learning but that
the word of God might come as readily from the
lips of an ignorant man as from those of the scholar.

36 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

The Quakers founded no college in colonial times,
and their schools tended to lose their public char
acter and to become purely denominational. The
very religious tolerance of the Quakers, which was
so greatly to their credit, prevented the estab
lishment of any general system of education in
Pennsylvania. So many persons of every denomi
nation flocked to this haven of liberty that no one
church, not even that of the Friends, was able to
dominate the colony and impose its own schools
on the rest.

In the eighteenth century Pennsylvania suffered
the same fate as nearly all the other colonies. The
educational impress of the first founders was oblit
erated by the influx of immigrants of a new type,
men frequently themselves as well educated as the
original colonists but less concerned for the cause
of education. The submergence of the Dutch
schools in New Netherland and the lax enforce
ment of the school laws in Massachusetts were
paralleled by the fading out of William Penn's
ideal of education in the colony which he had
founded. In some respects Pennsylvania had to
face greater difficulties than did the other colonies.
Nowhere else in America, perhaps, was there so
little unity in the population as here. Catholics,

MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES 37

Quakers, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Episcopa
lians, Baptists, and Methodists all had their own
church schools and refused to send their children
to any other. In addition to the more powerful
denominations, an unusual number of tiny sects,
such as the Moravians, Mennonites, Amish,
Schwenkfelders, Dunkers, and Seventh Day Bap
tists, founded their settlements within the prov
ince. There was, moreover, as little harmony of
race as there was of religion. The Swedes and
Dutch along the Delaware still clung desperately
to their old language and customs; Germans, often
referred to as "Pennsylvania Dutch" by their Eng
lish neighbors, settled the country in large num
bers; and the Scotch-Irish became a vanguard on
the edge of the backwoods in the West.

As the most numerous of the alien elements of
the population, the Germans early attracted the
benevolent interest of the English and to such a
degree that in 1754 there was organized in London
a "Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowl
edge Among the Germans in America." The free
schools founded by this missionary agency were
unquestionably needed, but the Germans resented
the patronizing implication that they were fit ob
jects of charity, and they also feared that if their

38 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

children went to these schools they might forget
their native language and abandon the religion
of their fathers. Isolated by distance from the
well-educated people of Germany and unwilling to
enter heartily into what was to them a foreign cul
ture, the Pennsylvania Germans too frequently
grew indifferent to the schooling of their children,
though their churches, notably the Moravian, la
bored to keep alive to some extent the old love of
learning. In consequence, though the educated were
but few, they never wholly " ceased out of the land."
Delaware, settled by the Swedes, is another ex
ample of high colonial hopes disappointed. Swe
den stood second to no country in Europe in
the matter of elementary education. About the
time the Delaware settlement was made, it is said,
there was not a peasant child in Sweden who had
not been taught to read and write. The instruc
tions for the colony of New Sweden in 1640 re
quired the patrons of the colony to support "as
many ministers and schoolmasters as the number
of inhabitants shall seem to require." But we find
the colonists of a later date complaining that they
were without regular schools, that the clergy who
essayed to teach the children were unequal to their
task, and that there was an almost complete dearth

MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES 39

of school-books. In spite of the fact that New
Sweden was no longer a political dependency of
the mother country, the Swedes responded to this
appeal by sending over catechisms, primers, and
various religious works. The colonists on their
part supported itinerant schoolmasters who taught
in private houses and combined the exercise of
their profession with the various duties of reader,
clerk, sexton, or precentor in the local church.

Parish schools and a supply of catechisms from
Sweden did not, however, suffice to keep alive a
separate national culture in so small and isolated
a community. The Swedish colony became at last
but a part of an English-speaking community of
very diverse origin, and its early experiments in
education left no traceable mark on the later edu
cational history of Delaware. The Dutch, during
their brief occupation, and the Quakers, while Dela
ware was still a part of Pennsylvania, encouraged
free schools within the limits of the province; but
in the eighteenth century education in Delaware
fell into public neglect and became wholly a matter
of private charity.

New Jersey, for a time part of the Dutch colony
of New Netherland, was the object of as much edu
cational solicitude as the region east of the Hudson.

40 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Later, under the rule of the "proprietors" of East
and West Jersey, the English undertook the task
of public education. In 1682 the Assembly of West
Jersey granted to the town of Burlington the island
of Matinicunk in the Delaware River for the sup
port of schools ; and at different times several other
generous land grants were made to important
towns. The Assembly of East Jersey authorized
the inhabitants of any town in the province to levy
taxes for the establishment and support of schools;
but, after New Jersey became a royal province in
1702, this attempt at founding a public school sys
tem was not followed up. New Jersey in the eight
eenth century became, like all its neighbors, a land
of private schools.

The Southern Colonies followed more closely the
educational system of England, since they were not
affected either by the Puritan zeal for public educa
tion dominant in New England or by the Dutch,
Swedish, German, or Quaker traditions of the
parish school as an adjunct to the local church
which in one form or another characterized the
school systems of the Middle Colonies. English
traditions favored the foundation of private second
ary schools and colleges under public patronage
but did not encourage a general system of free

MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES 41

elementary schools. There was, however, a trace of
compulsion in the laws which required guardians
to take care that orphan children received an edu
cation suitable to their station in life, and in the
apprentice laws which safeguarded the interests of
those who were bound out to labor. One or two of
the Southern Colonies advanced a little beyond
English precedent. Maryland and South Caro
lina experimented during the eighteenth century
with a system of tax-supported county schools,
and, though the law was not carried out in either
colony to its full intent, the poor of the more im
portant towns always had some opportunity for a
free education.

Maryland passed a law in 1696 creating a cor
poration to establish and govern county schools,
but King William's School at Annapolis was the
only public school established under this central
ized system. The Assembly in 1723 established a
fund for the county schools and arranged for their
government by boards of visitors in each county.
These Latin grammar schools were free to the poor
but required fees of those who were able to pay;
they varied a great deal in merit; and they had
difficulty in finding competent schoolmasters at the
small salaries they offered. As late as 1797 there

42 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

was complaint that King William's was the only
adequately endowed school in Maryland and that
"two-thirds of the little education we receive are
derived from instructors who are either indentured
servants or transported felons/*1 It gives the
modern reader something of a shock to read of a
reward offered for the return to his master of a run
away "schoolmaster, of a pale complexion, with
short hair. He has the itch very bad, and sore
legs," and again "he is a great taker of snuff and
very apt to get drunk."

In the Carolinas special acts by the colonial
legislatures permitted individual towns to estab
lish schools, but sometimes a town failed to take
advantage of this permissive law. South Carolina,
by laws enacted in 1710 and 1712, founded a gram
mar school at Charleston which was to be open to
the poor and authorized the establishment of a
general system of parish schools. The provisions
of these laws were not effectively carried out except
in the city of Charleston, but several county gram
mar schools were later established on a basis similar
to that of the Maryland schools. In both Carolinas
the education of the poor was largely taken in hand

1 Bernard C. Steiner, History of Education in Maryland, U. S.
Bureau of Education (1894), No. 19, pp. 34-38.

MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES 43

by the Church of England through the charity
schools established by the Society for the Propaga
tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Georgia was
founded so late in the colonial period that it hardly
requires any special notice except for the fact that
the British Crown, when it took over the colony
from its trustees, continued to support a minister
and two schoolmasters.

The distinction between schooling and education
was particularly marked in the South. Some of
the best educated men in America came from the
South, and yet some of the best educated men of
the South never saw the inside of a school building.
Even before the Revolutionary War many planta
tion owners hired as private tutors for their chil
dren men who might have any degree of education
from that of the indentured servant who could
barely read and write to that of the cultured grad
uate of Oxford or Cambridge. Plantation life itself
was a liberal education in agriculture, business
management, horsemanship, and the conventions
of polite society — subjects as essential in those
days to a well-rounded career as any of the more
academic branches. If a type of education is to
have its value estimated by its products, the South
ern plantation must rank as one of the best of

44 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

schools, since it supplied so many of the statesmen
of the Revolution and of the early republic. The
educational advantages of the plantation were,
however, for the very few. The poor man rarely
had an opportunity to advance his children beyond
a knowledge of the three R's and could have them
taught so much only by accepting charity.

Well-to-do men in all the colonies, but especially
in the South, frequently sent their boys to schools
and colleges in England. Just as our great Eastern
universities today draw students from the South
and West, so in those earlier days did Oxford and
Cambridge attract the ambitious youth of America.
It was hard to establish colleges on the new con
tinent when they had to compete with the prestige
of such ancient and well-endowed institutions of
learning in the Old World. If the voyage to Eng
land had not then been so long, costly, and hazard
ous, several of the colonial colleges might never
have been founded. Some discerning Englishmen
saw in this intellectual dependence on the mother
country one of the surest bonds which kept the
British Empire from disintegration, and they
viewed with a mixture of sympathy and apprehen
sion the rise of new academies and colleges. Said
one William Eddis, a surveyor of customs at

MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES 45

Annapolis, in 1773 : " When the real or supposed ne
cessity ceases of sending the youth of this continent
to distant seminaries for the completion of their
education, the attachment of the colonies to Great
Britain will gradually weaken, and a less frequent
intercourse will tend to encourage those sentiments
of self-importance which have already taken too
deep root, and which, I fear, the utmost exer
tions of political wisdom will never be able wholly
to eradicate."1

Perhaps Cecil Rhodes had in mind the omen of
this true prophecy when he established scholarships
at Oxford for the youth of the British Dominions.
When a colony makes its own laws and its own
hardware, it may still be loyal to the mother coun
try from motives of sentiment; but when it writes
its own books and reads its own newspapers, it
loses all sense of dependence and becomes either a
new nation or an equal partner within a common
federation. The schools and colleges of America,
imperfect and inadequate though they were,
sufficed even at an early date to create a separate
"consciousness of kind" among the colonists and
helped to make possible the establishment of the
United States.

1 Steiner, op. cit., p. 32.

CHAPTER IV

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE

After wee had builded our Louses, provided necessaries for our
livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and setled
the Civill Government, one of the next things wee longed for and
looked after was to advance Learning and to perpetuate it to
Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministery to the Churches,
when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust. And as wee were
thinking and consulting how to effect this great Work, it pleased
God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly gentleman
and a lover of Learning, there living amongst us) to give the one-
half of his estate (it being in all about £1,700) towards the erect
ing of a Colledge, and all his library. After him another gave
£300; others after them cast in more, and the publique hand of
the State added the rest. — New England's First Fruits.

COULD John Harvard revisit the university which
bears his name and the town which bears that of
his own Alma Mater, Cambridge, he would doubt
less find much to surprise him, but he would find
that America still combined the most munificent
private generosity towards the cause of higher
education with the unfailing aid of "the publique
hand of the State." The colonial college, of which

46

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 47

Harvard was the first example, is the parent not
only of the modern private university but of the
State supported institution as well. Even in the
colonies outside New England where the Govern
ment did little for the common schools, the college
was never left wholly dependent upon fees and
benefactions. The public authorities were always
ready to do something, if it were only to hold a
lottery in aid of the endowment.

The bequest of the godly John Harvard came in
the nick of time to save the struggling young col
lege founded in 1636 at Newtown, later Cambridge.
The £400 voted by the General Court of the Colo
ny of Massachusetts Bay proved hardly sufficient
to build a flourishing school, although it amounted
to as much as all other public expenses of the
colony for that year. John Harvard's bequest of
two hundred and sixty books, mainly treatises on
theology, was a bigger proportionate addition to
the intellectual resources of the community than a
gift of the million volumes now on the shelves of
Harvard library would be today. It was an acci
dent or, as Puritan Massachusetts would have said,
a providence that the College ever received this
bequest, for John Harvard, when he died in 1638,
had been in the colony barely a year.

48 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

All the colonial colleges made an attempt to copy
the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
but they were at first too poor to become universi
ties in the English sense of federations of many
undergraduate colleges. Each college was wholly
simple in its structure, with but one faculty and
one course of study. The American system never,
indeed, included under the nominal control of one
examining body a number of coordinate colleges
of independent foundation offering practically
similar courses of study. When, in later years,
new schools and departments were founded and
the American college developed into the American
university, there still remained but one general or
academic college apart from the specialized pro
fessional schools. The early colonial college itself
was originally in one respect something of a pro
fessional school, as its foremost aim was not to
give "the education of a gentleman " to young men
of means and leisure but to train a learned ministry.

The formal education which was prevalent in
Europe in the seventeenth century and which was
transplanted to colonial America emphasized two
subjects: the classics of Greece and Rome and the
duties of the Christian to his Creator. In those
days Latin was the language of culture, and theology

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 49

was queen of the sciences. The boy who had grad
uated from a grammar school was expected to be
able to read and write easy Latin and to know a
little of Greek grammar. Did his knowledge ex
tend to these points, he had satisfied the require
ments for admission to Harvard. Nobody both
ered to ask him whether he could add a column of
figures twice and get the same answer both times,
or name the principal rivers of New England, or
even spell his native tongue correctly. Once ad
mitted to the college, he spent little time in the
formal study of Latin but he practiced its daily
use in the classroom and in private conversa
tion. Latin was the key to knowledge, and the
storehouse of wisdom was the college.

A somewhat varied mental diet was set before
the student, but he was compelled to partake of
whatever was given him. No broad elective sys
tem of studies a la carte had yet been devised. The
college youth of those days studied the Bible
throughout his course and, for a year, "catecheti
cal divinity." Mainly that he might be able to
read the New Testament in the original he studied
Greek, and that he might be able to read the Old
Testament he took a year of Hebrew. At one time
Chaldee and Syriac were also taught. On the other

50 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

hand, if the student wished to learn a little French
or German, he could get no help from the college.
Logic, ethics, and politics were each studied for
two years, and a few lectures on physics, history,
and botany were sometimes slipped into the course.
The bachelor's degree was conferred upon every
scholar "able to read the originals of the Old and
New Testament into the Latin tongue, and to re
solve them logically," provided he were "of Godly
life and conversation." For the master's degree,
the bachelor must present a thesis and defend it.

In addition to the formal defense of the master's
thesis, a number of "disputations" were intro
duced into the college course. Sometimes these
dealt with such profundities of metaphysics as,
"Is the act of creation eternal?" Or they might
involve more detailed theological problems such as,
"When Balaam's ass spoke, was there any change
in its organs?" Anon it would be such a scientific
question as, for instance, "Were the aborigines of
America descended from Abraham?" Occasion
ally one strikes much more modern notes: "Is the
voice of the people the voice of God? " " Is it law
ful to sell Africans?" or, to choose an example from
disputations at Yale, "Whether the Latin and
Greek languages are studied too much in America."

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 51

In the seventeenth century, when Harvard was
practically a Congregational theological seminary,
this exercise in forensics was excellent training for
the practice of the ministry, and a century later,
when law and politics came to the fore, the same
type of disputations brought out any talent for
oratory that might be lurking in the young colle
gian. Cotton Mather, who was admitted to Har
vard College at the age of twelve, writes of his
studies there:

I composed Systems both of Logick and Physick, in
Catachisms of my own, which have been since used by
many others. I went over the use of Globes and pro
ceeded in Arithmetic as far as was ordinary. I made
Theses and Antitheses upon the main Questions that
lay before me. For my Declamations I ordinarily took
some Article of Natural Philosophy for my subject, by
which contrivances I did Kill two birds with one Stone.
Hundreds of books I read over, and I kept a Diary of
my studies. My son I would not have mentioned these
things, but that I may provoke your emulation.

The more important of the early colleges add an
interesting chapter to the story of the rise of mod
ern American education. The first head of Har
vard, Nathaniel Eaton, had a career that was brief
and inglorious. In these days of committees on
academic discipline, it is interesting to read

52 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

he was finally removed from office for beating a
boy too severely. By the laws of the college, mis
conduct might be punished as in the common
school: "If any scholar shall transgress any of the
laws of God, or the House . . . after twice ad
monition, he shall be liable, if not adultus, to cor
rection; if adultus, his name shall be given up to
the Overseers of the College." But Eaton exceeded
his privilege in this respect. What was worse, he
and his wife neglected the material welfare of the
students, who had to make their own beds or clean
their own rooms if the work were to be done at all,
and "their diet was ordinarily nothing but porridge
and pudding, and that very homely." Complaints
against the "commons" have been frequent in
most colleges but rarely with better justification
than during the early days of Harvard.

Better days came when Henry Dunster took
charge of Harvard in 1640, with the title of Presi
dent. He was a vigorous and capable executive,
whose energy placed the college for the first time
on a secure and permanent basis. But he fell into
the heresy of "antipaedobaptism," and Puritan
Massachusetts — which did not tolerate the Bap
tists, as Roger Williams found to his cost — put
President Dunster out of his position. The one

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 53

concession granted to him on his dismissal was
that he might be allowed to remain in the Presi
dent's house until the winter was over. After his
time Harvard became such a battleground for
theologians that it soon became difficult to find an
able man to take the presidency. Orthodox Cal
vinism found a strong champion in President
Increase Mather, and Liberalism one in President
John Leverett. The latter was bitterly attacked
by Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather and
himself an unsuccessful candidate for the presi
dency of the college. He complained that pious
youths who went to Harvard graduated as sceptics
and heretics, that the students filled their rooms
"with books which may be truly called Satan's
library," and he demanded an inquiry "whether
the books mostly read among them are not plays,
novels, empty and vicious pieces of poetry."

The suspicion of too lax theology which thus
early attached itselr to Harvard College was one
cause for the establishment of Yale, the third
college to be founded in the English colonies, and
the first American instance of academic parent
hood. Harvard had been founded by men edu
cated in England, but Yale was the work of grad
uates of Harvard. It is perhaps remarkable that,

54 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

considering the jealousies of different colonies and
churches, Harvard remained for some two genera
tions without a rival. Poverty, the French, and
the Indians seem to have been the three leading
causes for the educational monopoly so long en
joyed by the Massachusetts college.

In 1701 several devout Congregational ministers
gave generously of their scanty hoard of books to
wards the foundation of a college in Connecticut,
rightly thinking that the way to begin a college
was with a library. During the same year the
General Assembly authorized the erection of a
" collegiate school" to fit students for "Publick
employment both in Church and Civil State," thus
striking from the very beginning that note of state
craft and public service which has ever since been
the dominant ideal of Yale.

For several years, however, Yale College lacked
both a permanent local habitation and a name.
For fifteen years the college was located at Say-
brook, but the actual teaching was frequently
done elsewhere. In 1717 a permanent home, the
"College House," was begun in New Haven, and
the following year it received the name of Yale
College after Elihu Yale, one of its earliest and
most munificent benefactors.

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 55

Elihu Yale was a child of Boston, though for the
greater part of his active career he was in the In
dian civil service and finally rose to be Governor of
Fort St. George at Madras. But he always re
tained an interest in the distant land of his birth
and was easily persuaded to give books and money
to the struggling little college at New Haven.

Another benefactor of Yale who deserves to be
mentioned in this connection was Bishop George
Berkeley, the English philosopher, whose cher
ished dream it had been to found a college in the
New World. His first thought was to establish
one in the Bermudas but, unable to realize this
plan, he wisely turned to Yale instead. He gave
his Rhode Island farm, still known as the Dean's
farm, to the college and also presented it with
a carefully selected library of nearly a thousand
volumes. The roll of the Berkeleyan scholarship
which he founded bears the names of twelve college
presidents. His name is further commemorated
in the seat of a still larger institution on the other
side of the continent, the University of California.

With the foundation of Harvard and Yale the
needs of the Congregationalists were met. Those
who considered Harvard too liberal could obtain a
purer Calvinism from the sister college. But other

56 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

denominations were growing to importance and
were demanding educational opportunities. The
needs of the Presbyterian community were met by
the organization of the College of New Jersey at
Princeton ; the Dutch Reformed could go to Queens,
now Rutgers; the Anglicans had King's, now Col
umbia, and the Baptists, Brown. During the
eighteenth century an increasing number of young
men went to college who had no thoughts of enter
ing the ministry, and they were usually made
welcome regardless of any niceties of creed. In
the charter of Brown University, for example,
there was this provision: "Into this Liberal &
Catholic Institution shall never be admitted any
Religious Tests but on the Contrary all the Mem
bers hereof shall for ever enjoy full free Absolute
and uninterrupted Liberty of Conscience." Words
could hardly be more emphatic, and the liberal
intention of the Baptist founders was further
demonstrated by another provision giving a cer
tain number of Congregationalists, Presbyterians,
Quakers, and Episcopalians places on the Board
of Trustees. Yet the rules of Brown forbade any
student to assert his disbelief in Christianity, ex
cept "Young Gentlemen of the Hebrew Nation."
Of all the colonial colleges the nearest to a complete

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 57

independence of denominational influences was
the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded
in the middle of the century.

The eighteenth century witnessed not only a re
laxation of strict doctrinal requirements in the col
leges but the introduction of a broader curriculum.
Hebrew took a minor place in the course of study,
and more emphasis was placed upon the purely
literary side of Greek and Latin. More attention
began to be paid to mathematics and the sciences,
and every college did its best to obtain a few physi
cal and astronomical instruments with which to
demonstrate to the pupils the wonders of nature
and to the parents the fact that the institution
was awake to the spirit of the times. Nothing
could be more significant than these words from
the prospectus issued in 1754 by Samuel John
son, the first President of King's College, now
Columbia University:

And lastly, a serious, virtuous, and industrious Course
of Life being first provided for, it is further the Design
of this College to instruct and perfect the Youth in the
Learned Languages, and in the Arts of reasoning ex
actly, of writing correctly, and speaking eloquently; and
in the Arts of numbering and measuring; of Surveying
and Navigation, of Geography and History, of Husban
dry, Commerce and Government, and in the Knowledge

58 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

of all Nature in the Heavens above us, and in the Air,
Water and Earth around us, and the various kinds
of Meteors, Stones, Mines and Minerals, Plants and
Animals, and of every Thing useful for the Comfort,
the Convenience and the Elegance of Life, in the chief
Manufactures relating to any of these Things: And,
finally, to lead them from the Study of Nature to the
Knowledge of themselves, and of the God of Nature,
and their Duty to Him, themselves, and one another,
and every Thing that can contribute to their true
Happiness, both here and hereafter.

It may, indeed, be fairly questioned whether King's
College or any other college of the time could even
approximate the realization of such a comprehen
sive ideal as this. But it is certain that no college
or university since then has advanced beyond it,
and it is equally certain that by the time of the
Revolution all the American colleges were more or
less actuated by a belief that education should
include more than piety and grammar.

The last thing to be modernized in the American
college was its discipline. The rod was, indeed,
finally expelled from the higher institutions of
learning. But the undergraduate was bound to a
fixed routine of life by a double system of laws,
those of the college and those of the campus. The
college authorities saw to it that the student arose

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 59

betimes, usually at six o'clock, that he missed no
lectures or recitations, that he kept regular hours
of study, that he shunned all bad habits, and that
on all occasions he showed due courtesy and
subordination to his superiors. In Harvard, for
example, it was ordered that

No scholar shall take tobacco, unless permitted by the
President, with the consent of their parents and guar
dians, and on good reason first given by a physician,
and then in a sober and private manner.

To see that such rules were kept, the student was
deprived of the right of privacy. A rather amus
ing regulation at Brown reveals the existence of a
system of " domiciliary visits " which today would
be thought to verge on the intrusive:

No student shall refuse to open the door when he shall
hear the stamp of the foot or staff at his door in the en
try, which shall be a token that an officer of instruction
desires admission, which token every student is forbid
to counterfeit, or imitate under any pretense whatever.

And were these students too docile to require such
rigid discipline or might the officer of instruction
who banged on the floor outside the study expect
to find some mischief within? To tell the truth,
the colonial undergraduate at certain times and
D laces was more unruly than his counterpart of the

60 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

present day. Let Philip Fithian relate from a page
of his diary for 1770 how things then went in the
good Presbyterian College of New Jersey. Among
the amusements he specifies are:

Strewing the entries in the Night with greasy Feathers;
freezing the Bell ; Ringing it at late Hours of the Night
. . . writing witty pointed anonymous Papers . . .
Picking from the neighborhood now and then a plump
fat Hen or Turkey . . . Darting Sunbeams upon the
Town-People, Reconoitering Houses in the Town, &
ogling Women with a Telescope — Making Squibs, &
other frightful compositions with Gunpowder, & light
ing them in the Rooms of timorous Boys & new comers.

Yet in the same college of which Mr. Fithian tells
such mischievous deeds and at the same period,
the faculty, ever solicitous for the good conduct of
the students in their charge, prohibited the game
of shinny because it sometimes resulted in acci
dents and because there were "many amusements
both more honorable and more useful in which
they are indulged."

An interesting glimpse of student life in those
distant college days is given in the following letter:

Written at Princeton, Jan. 13, Anno 1772.

VERY DEAR, & MUCH RESPECTED FATHER,

Through the distinguished Kindness of Heaven. I
am in good Health, & have much Cause to be delighted

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 61

with my Lot. I would not change my Condition nor
give up the Prospect I have before me, on any Terms
almost whatever.

I am not much hurried this Winter with my Studies;
but I am trying to advance myself in an Acquaintance
with my fellow-Creatures, & with the Labours of the
"Mighty Dead."

I am sorry that I may inform you, that two of our
Members were expelled from the College yesterday; not
for Drunkenness, nor Fighting, not for Swearing, nor
Sabbath-Breaking. But, they were sent from this Sem
inary, where the greatest Pains and Care are taken to
cultivate and encourage Decency, & Honesty, & Honour,
for stealing Hens! Shameful, mean, unmanly Conduct !

If a Person were to judge of the generality of Stu
dents, by the Conduct of such earth-born, insatiate
Helluo's; or by the detested Character of wicked In
dividuals, (which is generally soonest & most exten
sively propagated & known abroad,) how terrible an
Idea must he have!

Please to remember my kind Regards to my
Brothers; Sister BECKA & the whole Family. I feel
my Heart warm with Esteem for them! but can only
further, at present, write myself, dear Father, Yours,

P. FITHIAN

It is hardly necessary to say that organized
athletics had little place in the colonial college
compared with their vogue in the modern Ameri
can college and university. Even as recently
as the Civil War an English observer, while

62 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

greatly praising the earnest zeal of the American
undergraduate in his studies, had this to say:

The utmost physical recreation seemed to consist in a
country walk, and I doubt if even this was com
mon. This absence of desire for physical sports seems
more or less common throughout America, and is
very strange in the eyes of those accustomed to the ex
hibition of animal spirits in the English youth of
both sexes.1

But the current of youthful energy which was for
bidden to flow freely in the path of athletics found
its outlets elsewhere, and not only in miscellane
ous mischief such as shocked the young Fithian.
There were no Greek letter societies until Phi Beta
Kappa was organized in 1776, but rival literary
societies with long Greek names served equally
well as centers of social life and generators of clan
loyalty. Ritual functions accumulated around
commencement and other college anniversaries.
Special local customs, such as the burning of Euclid
at the end of a mathematical course, took root and
spread, and even before the advent of college jour
nalism the poet and the satirist found opportunity
to make known their talent to the campus.

'Sophia Jex Blake, A Visit to Some American Schools and
Colleges (1867), p. 33.

THE COLONIAL COLLEGE 63

However greatly the student may have resented
the paternal oversight of his conduct which custom
then required of the faculty, he submitted willingly
to the no less exacting informal discipline imposed
upon him by his older fellows, hoping perhaps to
become a despot in his turn. The Freshman rules
of today are but a survival of the iron code preva
lent in colonial times. The English fagging system
still obtained; Freshmen were compelled to perform
"all reasonable errands for any superior," as the
Yale rules of 1764 put it. To quote further from
the Yale code, "A Senior may take a Freshman
from a Sophomore, a Bachelor from a Junior, and
a Master from a Senior." The Freshman must
stand aside for upperclassmen at entrances or
on stairways, must refrain from such boisterous
conduct as running in the college yard or calling
from a window, and must not sit in the presence
of an upperclassman or other superior without
special permission.

These questions of college life are not so remote
from the main purpose of education as they may
seem. Just as the instructor made correctness and
propriety of expression the aim of literary teaching
and discouraged the original if it were also the un
conventional, and just as the college President and

64 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

his assistants made the faith and morals of their
charges their chief concern, so did the student body
accept and impose its own discipline to curb the
eccentric or nonconformist Freshman. Individu
ality, in a word, was taken for granted, but it
was something to be restrained rather than fos
tered. Perhaps this was a wise course in a frontier
commonwealth; perhaps this type of disciplinary
education was necessary to give social cohesion to
the young republic whose leaders and founders
were trained by the colonial college. At all events,
the education provided was, as far as it went, no
sham. College was no excuse for idling, as too
commonly was the case in eighteenth century
Oxford and Cambridge. The American student
obtained his degree only by hard intellectual
work and, not infrequently, he remained in college
only by supporting himself there by hard work
of another kind™ America had yet to create a
leisure class.

CHAPTER V

<yM?#')qi%W^pQ.mv$ : wjjnoijul'

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION

Franklin's is the weightiest voice that has as yet sounded from
across the Atlantic. — Matthew Arnold.

FRANKLIN'S name is likely to occur in the first
paragraphs of any history of American activities,
whether the subject be diplomacy or printing, elec
tricity or finance, literature or ventilation, religion
or soap-making. Certainly it would be impossible
to write of American education without mention
of the various projects that originated in his ver
satile and ingenious mind. Franklin was self-
educated. His theory and practice of mental and
moral education are given in his Autobiography.
Franklin was sent to the Boston Grammar School
when he was eight but was soon withdrawn for, as
the youngest son of seventeen children, he was
needed by his father to assist in molding tallow
candles. At the age of twelve he was apprenticed
to a brother who was a printer and thus was started

5 65

66 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

upon the path, since followed by many Americans,
that leads through journalism to statesmanship.
Giving his nights to the study of Addison — by
means of an odd volume of the Spectator purloined
from a bookseller — he taught himself a style quite
un-Addisonian, a terse, brisk, businesslike, plain,
matter-of-fact style that has since become charac
teristic of American newspapers. The lucidity of
his papers on electricity is in marked contrast with
the bombastic and obscure style of contemporary
savants. He even ventured to carry his clarity
into the realms of diplomacy and philosophy,
where it was still more of an innovation.

His theory of conduct he was not afraid to put
to the pragmatic test — and it worked. Entering
Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice at the age of
seventeen, penniless and ragged, he was able, by
the practice of the thrift and vigilance that he
preached, to retire with a competency at the age
of forty-two in order to devote himself to re
searches in electricity, though the calls of pub
lic service kept him busy throughout his long
life. He found Philadelphia behind Boston in
two respects, "there being no provision for de
fense nor for a compleat education of youth; no
militia nor any college." He promptly set about

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION 67

remedying both defects and in the course of time
was successful.

His first step in the way of cooperative effort was
the formation of the Junto, a sort of fraternity or
debating society, somewhat after the plan of the
Benefit Societies that Cotton Mather had started
in the Congregational churches of Massachusetts.
The dozen young men who composed it met every
Friday evening to discuss political, scientific, and
moral questions, and to consider ways of helping
one another and the community. This may be
regarded as the precursor of the American lyceum
which was to exercise so powerful an influence over
the thought and politics of the nation in the cen
tury to come. Each member of the Junto, at
Franklin's suggestion, agreed to put the few books
he owned into a room where they could be used in
common. He next obtained subscriptions from
fifty persons and was able to send off to London an
order for £45 worth of books. In this way a per
manent circulating library was opened, with Frank
lin as librarian to give out the books once a week.
To the Junto we therefore owe the origin of the
public library system which in America has at
tained proportions unequaled anywhere else in the
world. As Franklin says:

68 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

This was the mother of all the North American sub
scription libraries, now so numerous. It is become a
great thing in itself and continually increasing. These
libraries have improved the general conversation
of the Americans, made the common trades men and
farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other
countries, and perhaps have contributed in some
degree to the stand so generally made throughout the
colonies in defense of their privileges.

To estimate the value or trace the influence of
the library movement started by Benjamin Frank
lin is impossible here, but one of its many radia
tions is of educational interest. Franklin's popu
larity made him the godfather to seventy-two
towns, and from one of the earliest — a Massa
chusetts town — came in 1784 the announcement
that it had taken the name of Franklin and the
suggestion that he present it with a church bell.
Franklin replied that, "sense being preferable to
sound," he would give them a town library instead,
and so he sent them sixty -eight works "such as are
most proper to inculcate the principles of sound
religion and just government." In this same little
town of Franklin, Massachusetts, there was born
a dozen years later a boy by the name of Horace
Mann. He was educated, as he says himself, in
"the smallest school in the poorest schoolhouse

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION 69

with the cheapest teachers in the State," but he
had access to one avenue leading to the world of
letters, the library that Franklin had given to the
town in lieu of a bell. Horace Mann, thus rescued
from ignorance, became in time the promoter of
the American public school for Massachusetts and
for the nation. He used to say that he would like
to scatter libraries broadcast over the land as a
farmer sows his wheat, and this dream of his has
been realized today by Andrew Carnegie.

Franklin's plans for an Academy at Philadelphia
are contained in the Proposals Relating to the Edu
cation of Youth in Pensilvania which he drew up in
1749 and later printed in pamphlet form. This
aged and neglected document reads like the pros
pectus of some "modern school" desired by Charles
W. Eliot and Abraham Flexner, or one of the
"schools of tomorrow" described by John Dewey.
It is based upon a psychology of learning whose
principles have only recently come into recognition
- that learning comes by doing, that the concrete
should precede the abstract, that individual abili
ties and vocational aims should be early recognized,
and that the time to take up a particular study is
when the desire for it has been awakened.

History, for instance, which occupies a large

70 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

place in Franklin's scheme, he would have taught
by the extensive reading of translations of the
Greek and Roman historians, with the use of maps
and prints of medals and monuments, "followed
by the best modern histories, particularly of our
mother country, then of these colonies." It is
universal and comparative history that he wants,
with special reference to customs, politics, religion,
natural resources, commerce, and the growth of
science. History, thus properly taught, would
naturally lead to the study of ethics, logic, physics,
oratory, debating, and journalism. A few passages
will show what Franklin had in mind:

History will show the wonderful effects of oratory in
governing, turning and leading great bodies of man
kind, armies, cities, nations. When the minds of
youth are struck with admiration at this, then is the
time to give them the principles of that art, which they
will study with taste and application. Then they may
be made acquainted with the best models among the
ancients, their beauties being particularly pointed out
to them. Modern political oratory being chiefly per
formed by pen and press, its advantages over the an
cients in some respects are to be shown; as that its
effects are more extensive, more lasting, etc. . . .

On historical occasions, questions of right and wrong,
justice and injustice, will naturally arise, and may be
put to youth, which they may debate in conversation

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION 71

and in writing. When they ardently desire victory, for
the sake of the praise attending it, they will begin to feel
the want, and be sensible of the use of logic, or the art of
reasoning to discover truth, and of arguing to defend it,
and convince adversaries. This would be the time to ac
quaint them with the principles of that art. . . .

The history of commerce, of the invention of arts,
rise of manufacture, progress of trade, change of its
seats, with the reasons, causes, etc., may also be made
entertaining to youth and will be useful to all. And
this, with the accounts in other history of the prodi
gious force and effect of engines and machines used in
war will naturally introduce a desire to be instructed in
mechanics and to be informed of the principles of that
art by which weak men perform such wonders, labor
is saved, manufactures expedited, etc. This will be the
time to show them prints of ancient and modern ma
chines, to explain them and let them be copied, and to
give lectures in mechanical philosophy.

Certain words have been italicized in the passage
just quoted to show how clearly Franklin had con
ceived of the Herbartian principle of the necessity
of an " apperceptive basis" for the reception of
knowledge nearly a hundred years before Herbart
became known, and also that he advocated the
"case-method" of teaching ethics now brought
forward as a novelty.

All intended for divinity should be taught the Latin
and Greek; for physic [medical students] the Latin,

72 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Greek and French; for law, the Latin and French;
merchants, the French, German and Spanish; and
though all should not be compelled to learn Latin,
Greek or the modern foreign languages, yet none that
have an ardent desire to learn them should be refused ;
their English, arithmetic and other studies absolutely
necessary, being at the same time not neglected.

Franklin had acquired by his own exertions a prac
tical acquaintance with French, Spanish, and Ital
ian, and then had found Latin easier than he ex
pected. From this experience he came to the con
clusion that it would be better for any student to
begin with the modern languages and then proceed
to the ancient. If circumstances then prevented
him from studying the ancient, he would be sure
at least of having the more useful modern lan
guages. Franklin pointed out that Latin and
Greek were put into the European schools for utili
tarian purposes, because all the science, law, and
theology of an earlier day were to be obtained only
in these languages, but, he said, they have be
come "the chapeau bras of modern literature"
— the fashionable hat of the eighteenth cen
tury, once useful but now degenerated to a mere
honorific appendage.

4s Franklin attempted nothing less than a

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION 73

change of the center of gravity from Latin to Eng
lish, it is not to be wondered at that such heretical
ideas failed of acceptance by his generation. He
got the money for his projected Academy, with
English nominally recognized as a language equal
to Latin, but, as has so often happened, the "mod
ern side" was starved out while the Latin school
was fostered in spite of Franklin's protest against
such a misapplication of funds.

The institution thus started, however, developed
into the University of Pennsylvania, of which
Franklin was for forty years a trustee and which
he could now commend for carrying out many of
his ideas. The University of Pennsylvania was
from the start free from the sectarian influences
which prevailed in other colleges. Here was opened
in 1765 the first school of medicine in America.
History, politics, and economics, which formed
the core of Franklin's scheme of education, have
always been especially prominent in this institution.

At the same time that Franklin was urging the
establishment of an Academy he launched another
movement of almost equal importance. His Pro
posal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the
British Plantations in America, published in 1743,
called for a society to be formed "of virtuosi or

74 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

ingenious men residing in the several colonies," cor
responding to, and to correspond with, the Royal
Society of London and the Dublin Society. This
proposal resulted in the formation of the American
Philosophical Society, of which Franklin was presi
dent until his death in 1790. In the Transactions
of this Society many of the chief American contri
butions to science have appeared. Here are to be
found Franklin's paper on The Cause and Cure of
Smoky Chimneys, in which he anticipates the
modern system of ventilation and house-heating;
Priestley's Experiments and Observations on differ
ent kinds of Air, for the English discoverer of oxy
gen had been mobbed out of Birmingham and had
taken refuge in America, where he aided Franklin
and Jefferson in their educational reforms; the re
searches of Draper on the composition of the sun;
Joseph Henry's experiments on electro-magnetic
induction; and the paleontological investigations of
Leidy, Cope, and Hay den.

An institution, says Emerson, is but the length
ened shadow of a great man, and there is not
space enough here to do more than refer to some of
the shadows of this sort which Franklin cast. The
excellent manual training schools of Philadelphia;
Girard College, founded through the bequest of

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION 75

$2,000,000 by Stephen Girard in 1830 to give a
practical, moral, and patriotic education to or
phans; the Franklin Institute, founded in 1824 for
the promotion of mechanic arts; the so-called Ger
man College of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to which
Franklin was the chief contributor and which was
later named after him — these are but some of
the educational establishments that he instigated
or inspired.

One other scheme of Franklin's deserves atten
tion, partly because it is characteristic of the man,
and partly because of its economic interest. His
bequest of £1000 to Boston and Philadelphia, to be
lent out in small amounts at five per cent to young
married artificers for the purpose of setting them
up in business, would, he calculated, amount to
£131,000 by the end of a century. He would then
have £100,000 spent on objects of public utility
and the remaining £31,000 again put out at interest
for another hundred years, by the end of which
time it would provide £4,061,000 to be spent by
the city and State. Franklin seems to have also
had the secondary object of illustrating how rapid
ly money breeds but, as it turned out, the bequest
illustrated rather the futility of attempting to an
ticipate in detail the needs of the distant future.

76 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

The number of married artificers under twenty-
five who wanted to borrow from $65 to $300 "for
setting up their business" fell off in the course of
years until, in 1890, the Philadelphia fund reached
only $86,280 instead of the $655,000 which Frank
lin had calculated. Of the Boston fund, after
passing through the inevitable period of litigation,
$400,000 was available in 1908. This amount was
doubled by Andrew Carnegie, and with it there
was erected the Franklin Union for evening courses
in industrial education.

Franklin's best work as an educator of the Ameri
can people was, after all, not accomplished through
these various institutions but directly through the
medium of his pamphlets, newspapers, and al
manacs. Poor Richard's Almanack was the only
book in thousands of homesteads, and his prover
bial philosophy became the common coin of con
versation from which his image and superscription
have long been obliterated through constant usage.
Father Abraham's speech at the vendue on how to
remedy hard times, a medley of Poor Richard's
sayings, has been translated into all languages and
reprinted four hundred times.

Franklin was as much of an economist as a man
could be before the science of economics was born^

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION 77

He anticipated Malthus in the law of the relation
of population to sustenance and Adam Smith in
the measure of value by the labor involved. Frank
lin's experimental proof of the similar nature of
lightning and the Leyden spark was a scientific
discovery of the first order, and his "one-fluid"
theory of electricity, his conception of positive and
negative electrification, has not only served as a
useful hypothesis ever since but is strikingly in
keeping with the modern electron theory. But
Franklin himself did not get so much gratification
out of such contributions to science as he did from
the thought that he had taught some millions of
people such homely truths as these:

He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn at
no other.

It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.

He who by the plow would thrive
Himself must either hold or drive.

CHAPTER VI

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION

A system of education which shall reach every description of
citizen from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so
will it be the latest of all public concerns in which I shall permit
myself to take an interest. Nor am I tenacious of the form in
which it shall be introduced. — Thomas Jefferson (1817).

THE founders of the Republic were men of long
stride, and the United States has found it hard to
keep up the pace they set. Certain phrases that
Jefferson put into the Declaration of Independence
as too obvious to need argument still arouse ad
miration or despair when Americans listen to the
reading of their political creed on the Fourth of
July. What Jefferson actually accomplished in
education was little; but what he aspired to and
inspired others to was immense. The appraisal of
his achievement depends upon whether the balance-
sheet is drawn during his life or a hundred years
later. In an aristocratic environment he cher
ished a democratic ideal, and he converted to the

78

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 79

principle of free schools and state support a people
who had been committed to restricted education
and individual responsibility.

Jefferson said that he was not "tenacious of the
form" in which his idea of universal education
should be introduced — and, indeed, the realiza
tion of his project came about in a way very differ
ent from his plan and much later than he had
hoped. His native State was slow to follow his
leadership. It was not until 1870 that a public
school system was established in Virginia, and even
at the beginning of the twentieth century 60 per
cent of the children were not in the schools.

The power of a personality, like the strength of
an electric current, may be measured by the resist
ance it can overcome. An appreciation of Jeffer
son's achievement involves a brief review of the
earlier history of education in Virginia which had
a very different beginning from New England.
The Mayflower in 1620 brought to the New World
53 men, 21 women, and 28 children. The three
ships coming to Virginia in 1609 contained 100
"settlers," among whom there were 55 gentlemen
and 12 servants, but no children. Ten years later,
when it occurred to the London Company of Vir
ginia that children were desirable in a colony, they

80 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

shipped over a batch of one hundred assorted
"orphants" to be apprenticed to the planters on
condition that they be taught some useful trade
and the Christian religion. This was the origin
of that apprentice system which, in Virginia and
other colonies, was the first form of compulsory
education for poor children.

Later in the seventeenth century some "free"
schools were established by bequests from philan
thropic persons. Among these may be mentioned
the Symms School, which received from its founder
two hundred acres of land and an endowment of
the calves and milk of eight cows. The Eaton
Free School was more wealthy. It possessed five
hundred acres of land, stocked with "two negroes,
twelve cows, two bulls, and twenty hogs."

But such efforts at the extension of education
among the lower classes did not meet with much
encouragement from the wealthier colonists. The
planters employed private tutors or engaged the
leisure of Church of England clergymen but did
not think it wise to educate the poorer people above
their proper station. The Lords Commissioners of
Trades and Plantations inquired, in 1671: "What
course is taken about instructing the people within
your government in the Christian religion and

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 81

what provision is there for the paying of your min
istry?" Governor Berkeley answered: "The same
course that is taken in England out of towns; every
man according to his ability instructing his chil
dren. We have forty-eight parishes and our minis
ters are well paid and by my consent should be
better if they would pray oftener and preach less.
. . . But, I thank God, there are no free schools
nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years, for learning has brought disobe
dience and heresy and sects into the world, and
printing has divulged them and libels against the
best government. God keep us from both ! "

The early efforts to start higher education in
Virginia met with even more emphatic opposition.
The London Company in 1619 granted a thousand
acres of land at Henrico on the James River for a
college for the Indians and nine thousand acres for
a college for the English. The bishops of England
raised $35,000 in money and obtained many gifts
of books and plate. George Thorpe of the King's
Privy Chamber, a gentleman "learned in scholar
ship and zealous in piety," was chosen as head of
the university, but the Indians soon put an end to
the ambitious enterprise by scalping him and six
teen of his tenants. As a result it was felt that the

82 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Indians were not yet ripe for higher education, and
when another movement was projected in 1624 to
establish a university it was to be confined to the
whites and located upon an island in the Susque-
hanna River. Though Edwin Palmer of London
drew up a fine plan for the grounds and buildings
of the Academia Virginiensis et Oxoniensis and
gave all his lands in America for the project,
nothing came of this second attempt at colonial
education in the South.

In 1660 the Assembly of Virginia showed its
realization of the need of higher education at least
for the ministry by passing the following law:

Whereas the want of able and faithful ministers in this
country deprives us of these great blessings and mercies
that allwaies attend upon the service of God which want
by reason of our great distance from our native country
cannot in probability be allwaies supply ed from thence,
Bee itt enacted that for the advance of learning, educa
tion of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion
of piety there be land taken upon purchases for a col-
ledge and freeschoole and that there be with as much
speede as may be convenient houseing erected thereon
for entertainment of students and schollers.

The Assembly having thus approved of the pro
ject, contributions were called for, and the Bur
gesses and government officials, including even

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 83

Governor Berkeley, "severally subscribed severall
considerable sumes of money and quantityes of
tobacco." But these donations were to be paid in
only after the college had been started, and it was
then discovered — what solicitors of college funds
have often noted since — that "the subscribed
money did not come in with the same readiness
with which it had been underwritten." For thirty
years the project languished, but in 1691 an ener
getic young Scotch clergyman, the Reverend
James Blair, took it in hand and went back to Eng
land to get the necessary money. Tactfully plan
ning his campaign, he went first to the bishops,
then to the Queen, next to the King, and finally
to the Attorney-General. Their Majesties, learn
ing that a college in Virginia had been named after
them, willingly agreed to contribute to its building
two thousand pounds out of the quitrents of Vir
ginia. But when Attorney-General Seymour was
approached, he declared that the Government
could not afford such expenditures until after the
war. Blair explained that the purpose of the col
lege as expressed in an act of the Virginia Assembly
was to educate young men for the ministry and
observed that Virginians had souls to be saved as
well as Englishmen at home. Seymour did not see

84 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the necessity. "Souls!" he exclaimed. "Damn
your souls ! Make tobacco ! ' ' z

But Blair persisted and not only got the royal
grant but valuable donations from other sources,
including — since he had no qualms about tainted
money— three hundred pounds from pirates.
Besides these endowments the College of William
and Mary received twenty thousand acres of land,
an export tax on tobacco of a penny a pound, and a
monopoly of the land office business. Some years
after the founding of the institution, taxes for the
benefit of the College of William and Mary were
imposed upon two other luxuries, liquors and furs.

So founded, the College of William and Mary,
chartered in 1693, was second only to Harvard in
seniority and in its first century was not behind its
New England rival in usefulness if tested, as a
college should be tested, by the quality of the men
it turned out. To this " Alma Mater of statesmen, *
as it came to be called, belongs the honor of having
trained three Presidents of the United States,
Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler,
also Peyton Randolph, the president of the Con
tinental Congress, and John Marshall the great

TThis is one of the stories which Franklin loved to tell. Set*
Sparks's Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. x, p. 111.

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 85

interpreter of the Constitution, as well as governors
and senators of Virginia too numerous to mention.
In 1779, when Jefferson was on the Board of Trus
tees, the College was made into a university, and
such innovations in American education as lecture
courses on political economy and on municipal,
constitutional, and international law were intro
duced and made elective. Here, too, was started,
in the year of the Declaration of Independence,
the patriotic and literary society known as Phi
Beta Kappa, the first of the host of Greek-letter
intercollegiate fraternities now flourishing.

The College of William and Mary was the child
of Church and State. Until after the Revolution
the Bishop of London was its Chancellor and his
commissary or deputy in Virginia its President.
The Reverend James Blair, its indefatigable pro
moter, served as President for its first half century.
The college was represented in the Virginia House
of Burgesses by a member elected by the faculty,
a system that still survives in England where the
universities are represented in the House of Com
mons. But when the capital was removed from
Williamsburg, the seat of the college, to Richmond
in 1779, the close connection of William and Mary
with the political life of the State was broken; and

86 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

when Jefferson established the University of Vir
ginia in 1819, the older institution received a blow
from which it never fully recovered. Williamsburg
was a storm center in two wars in both of which
the college suffered. Its buildings were burned
while occupied by the French troops at the siege
of Yorktown in 1781, and while occupied by the
Federal troops in 1862. For seven years in the
eighties the College of William and Mary was
closed, but it has survived all vicissitudes.

Such was Jefferson's point of departure in de
veloping his plan of public education which has
since then become characteristically American.
William and Mary was a colonial Oxford, under
the control of the Established Church and founded
primarily for the education of its clergy. Jefferson
broke with the traditional idea of a university
when he asked Virginia to establish a free and secu
lar university, supported and controlled by the
State. A committee headed by Jefferson met in
the tavern at Rockfish Gap in the Blue Ridge
Mountains on August 1, 1818, to draw up a plan
for the "Central College" of Virginia and followed
closely the idea which Jefferson had vainly urged
seventeen years before and which since has been
carried out in almost every State in the Union.

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 87

According to this plan each locality should main
tain its own elementary schools for the education
of every boy and girl. Secondary education should
be given in various parts of the State in academies
and colleges supported by the State or by tuition
fees. This mixed system of public high schools
and private schools and endowed colleges has
served very satisfactorily to reconcile the demand
for different kinds of training. At the top there
was to be a State University in which was to be
given the most advanced instruction in all branches
of knowledge. This institution was to be situated
in "an academical village," in buildings connected
by corridors and surrounding a lawn. Jefferson's
architectural plan for the University of Virginia
involved the employment of two Italian sculptors
to cut the capitals for the columns in classical forms.
The studies of the university were divided,
according to the decimal fashion of the day, into
ten groups "each of which are within the power of
a single professor," as the Rockfish Gap commis
sion said, though they evidently either overesti
mated the power of a professor or underestimated
the future expansion of the subjects. The ten
groups were: (1) Ancient Languages; (2) Modern
Languages, including French, Spanish, Italian,

88 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

German, and Anglo-Saxon; (3) Mathematics; (4)
Phy sico-mathematics ; (5) Physics, including chem
istry and mineralogy; (6) Botany and Zool
ogy* (7) Anatomy and Medicine; (8) Government,
Political Economy, and History; (9) Municipal
Law; (10) Ideology, including rhetoric, ethics,
belles-lettres and fine arts.

This curious curriculum shows the hand of
Jefferson in both its inclusions and omissions.
Anglo-Saxon was put among the modern languages
because Jefferson held that its study would "re
cruit and renovate the vigor of the English lan
guage, too much impaired by the neglect of its
ancient constitution and dialects." He argued that
the adoption of phonetic spelling would restore the
historic continuity of the language now obscured
by the accidents of the conventional spelling. x

Under "Ideology," a term introduced by Count
Destutt de Tracy of the French Institute, Jeffer
son hoped for the development of a new philosophy
free from the theological and metaphysical postu
lates of the old and leading toward a democratic
instead of a monarchical ideal of society. This

1 See Jefferson's Essay toward facilitating instruction in Anglo-
Saxon and Modern Dialects of the English Language for the use of
the University of Virginia.

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 89

ideal of Jefferson's has not yet been realized, al
though we may discern an approach toward it in
the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey,
hotly opposed in the monarchical countries of
Europe because of its democratic implications.

The prominent place given to science in the
Jeffersonian scheme was another novelty and ex
cited popular hostility, particularly when Thomas
Cooper, the first professor of chemistry chosen for
the new university, was — not without reason —
suspected of Unitarianism. The opposition to
Cooper was indeed so strong that the call had to
be canceled. *

The unprecedented omission of the dominant
department in the older universities, the theologi
cal, was thus explained by the Commission: "We
have proposed no professor of Divinity. This
will be within the province of the professor of
Ethics. We have thought it proper at this point
to leave any sects to provide as they think fittest
the means of further instruction in their own pe
culiar tenets." This very sensible solution of the

1 Jefferson's difficulties in getting a faculty for his university
are told in lively fashion by W. P. Trent in a paper on English
Culture in Virginia, in the Johns Hopkins Studies (1889). See
also Herbert B. Adams's Thomas Jefferson and the University of
Virginia, published by the U. S. Bureau of Education (1888).

90 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

denominational difficulty has not yet been carried
out as fully as it might be. What Jefferson hoped
for may be seen from a letter of his to Thomas
Cooper: "I think the invitation will be accepted
by some sects from candid intentions, and by
others from jealousy and rivalship. And by bring
ing the rival sects together and mixing them with
the mass of other students, we shall soften their
asperities, liberalize and neutralize their prejudices,
and make the general religion a religion of peace,
reason, and morality."

But for the greater part of the nineteenth cen
tury "the rival sects" preferred to keep up a fight
on the State Universities as "godless institutions,"
rather than attempt to supplement their deficien
cies as Jefferson had suggested. Recently, however,
some denominations have established residential
halls or theological seminaries near to the State
Universities and, by means of church clubs and
student pastors, have sought to foster religious
activities and study among the students.

Thomas Jefferson was chosen as the first Rector
of the University of Virginia and held that position
until his death in 1826. Many of the innovations
that he introduced or encouraged at William and
Mary or at the University of Virginia have been

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 91

widely adopted and now form part of the spirit of
American education. To those already mentioned
should be added the elective system and vocational
specialization, for it was Jefferson's idea that the
students should have "uncontrolled choice in the
lectures they shall choose to attend, and give ex
clusive application to those branches only which
are to qualify them for the particular vocations to
which they are destined." The elective system,
carried perhaps by George Ticknor to Harvard,1
was extended under President Eliot's adminis
tration to all studies and has been in some degree
adopted by all American universities and by most
colleges. Along with this principle of freedom of
learning and teaching, Jefferson also followed the
German universities in their system of rotation in
office. According to his plan the chief executive
was elected annually from among the members of
the faculty. But in this respect since his day the
tide has set in the other direction, and as the uni
versities have become more extensive and complex
their administration has become less democratic.
As it more clearly appeared that a university
gained in numbers, wealth, and renown when it

1 U. S. Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, No. 1.
1888, p. 127.

92 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

was under the leadership of a powerful personality,
the tendency has been to concentrate the control
in the hands of its president. Finally even the
University of Virginia succumbed and, with a per
manent president, has prospered unprecedentedly.

Jefferson desired to apply to the university the
same theory that he advocated for the State —
that the best government is the least government.
He wished to do away with corporal punishment,
espionage, and " useless observances which mere
ly multiply occasions for dissatisfaction, disobe
dience, and revolt." After Jefferson's death, how
ever, the student on matriculating had to sign an
eight-page pamphlet of regulations and penalties.
Small wonder that the consequent "disobedience
and revolt'' took the form of riots, in one of which
a professor was shot.

But the honor system, which was adopted in
1842 and by which the student's signed statement
that he has received no assistance in his work is
accepted without question, is decidedly Jefferso-
nian. It has been quite generally adopted, although
it is not everywhere so successful as it is in insti
tutions like Virginia and Princeton which have
a homogeneous student body with a strong and
unified public sentiment.

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION 93

Jefferson did not wish to have the university
confer any degrees, titles, or honors. A simple cer
tificate of graduation specifying the subject to which
the student had devoted most attention would, he
believed, answer the purpose. But here his country
has failed to follow him. Degrees have multiplied
amazingly and the ceremonies of conferring them
have developed an academic pomp that would
shock the early apostle of democratic simplicity.

But no man can hope to make posterity adopt
all his ideas. Jefferson was more fortunate than
most in this respect. The three achievements in
which he took most pride and which he wished to
have engraved upon his tombstone are still re
garded with reverence and gratitude by all Ameri
cans. Few men in history have had a grander
monument than the unpretentious stone bearing
the legend:

THOMAS JEFFERSON

AUTHOR
OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

OF

THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA

FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND

FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY

OF VIRGINIA.

CHAPTER VII

WASHINGTON AND NATIONAL EDUCATION

The time is therefore come when a plan of universal education
ought to be adopted in the United States. — George Washington
(1795}.

IP Jefferson, the father of the party of State Rights,
was content when he had founded the University
of Virginia, it is clear that Washington, the leader
of the Federalists, wanted nothing less than a
national system of education. The dominant mo
tive of both these statesmen was the same; the
difference between them lay in the scope of their
ideas. Jefferson wanted to unify the mind of the
individual State; Washington, to unify the mind
of the whole nation by educating the youth to
gether. Both feared foreign influences: Washing
ton, the evil influence of education in monarchical
England; Jefferson, the evil influence of New Eng
land teachers and preachers. Jefferson, in one of
his pessimistic moods, wrote to Joseph C. Cabell

04

WASHINGTON AND EDUCATION 95

that, unless Virginia established her own univer
sity, the State would have to send her children
to Kentucky or to Massachusetts. If they went
to Kentucky, they would stay there. If they
went to Massachusetts, they would return fanatics
and Tories.

If, however, we are to go a-begging any where for our
education I would rather it should be to Kentucky
than any other state because she has more of the
flavor of the old cask than any other. All the states
but our own are sensible that knowledge is power, . . .
while we are sinking into the barbarism of our Indian
aborigines and expect like them to oppose by igno
rance the overwhelming mass of light and science by
which we shall be surrounded. It is a comfort I am
not to live to sec this.

Washington's reasons for desiring a national uni
versity where youths from various parts of the
country could complete their education in common
are given in the following passage from his last will
and testament:

It has always been a source of serious regret with me,
to see the youth of these United States sent to foreign
countries for the purpose of education, often before
their minds were formed, or they had imbibed any
adequate ideas of the happiness of their own; contract
ing too frequently, not only habits of dissipation and
extravagance, but principles unfriendly to republican

96 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

government, and to the true and genuine liberties of
mankind, which thereafter are rarely overcome; for
these reasons it has been my ardent wish to see a plan
devised on a liberal scale, which would have a ten
dency to spread systematic ideas through all parts of
this rising empire, thereby to do away local attach
ments and State prejudices, as far as the nature of
things would, or indeed ought to admit, from our na
tional councils. Looking anxiously forward to the
accomplishment of so desirable an object as this is
(in my estimation), my mind has not been able to
contemplate any plan more likely to effect the meas
ure, than the establishment of a UNIVERSITY in a
central part of the United States, to which the youths
of fortune and talents from all parts thereof may be
sent for the completion of their education, in all the
branches of polite literature, in arts and sciences, in
acquiring knowledge in the principles of politics and
good government, and, as a matter of infinite impor
tance in my judgment, by associating with each other,
and forming friendships in juvenile years, be enabled
to free themselves in a proper degree from those local
prejudices and habitual jealousies which have just
been mentioned, and which, when carried to excess,
are never-failing sources of disquietude to the public
mind, and pregnant of mischievous consequences to
this country.

These words remind one of the will of that later
empire builder, Cecil Rhodes, who left a legacy
that picked young men from Australia, New Zea
land, Canada, South Africa, the United States,

WASHINGTON AND EDUCATION 97

and Germany might be educated together at Ox
ford with a view of reducing national antagonisms
and local prejudices.

That Washington cherished the idea even before
the Revolutionary War is proved by a passage in
Samuel Blodget's Economica:

As the most minute circumstances are sometimes in
structing for their relation to great events, we relate
the first that we ever heard of a national university:
it was in the camp at Cambridge, in October, 1775,
when Major William Blodget went to the quarters of
General Washington to complain of the militia quar
tered therein. The writer of this being in company
with his friend and relation, and hearing General
Greene join in lamenting the then ruinous state of the
eldest seminary of Massachusetts observed, merely to
console the company of friends, that to make amends
for these injuries, after our war, he hoped we should
erect a noble national university, at which the youth of
all the world might be proud to receive instructions.
What was thus pleasantly said, Washington imme
diately replied to, with that inimitably expressive and
truly interesting look for which he was sometimes so
remarkable: " Young man, you are a prophet! inspired
to speak what I am confident will one day be realized."

Washington then detailed his plans for a federal
city and university to be built near the falls of the
Potomac, speaking with such force that Blodget
was thoroughly converted and subsequently copy-

98 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

righted his Economica for the "benefit of the free
education fund of the university founded by
George Washington in his last years." This fund
began with about $25,000 in fifty shares in the
Potomac River Navigation Company which Wash
ington bequeathed to the Government for the pur
pose of founding a national university. These
shares had been given to Washington by Virginia,
together with a hundred shares in the James River
Company, as a reward for his services in the Revo
lutionary War. The James River stock he gave
to Liberty Hall Academy, a school in Virginia
established by the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians be
cause the College of William and Mary was too
narrowly Episcopalian. Thus aided, Liberty Hall
Academy developed into a college and later into a
university which took the name of its benefactor.
After the Civil War General Robert E. Lee became
its president, and since his death the institution
has been known as Washington and Lee University .
But although Washington showed his interest
in the educational institutions of his native State
by this endowment as well as by serving as chan
cellor of his Alma Mater, William and Mary, from
1788 until his death in 1799, he never relinquished
his belief that national as well as State institutions

WASHINGTON AND EDUCATION 99

of learning were needed. In his first speech to
Congress on January 8, 1790, Washington em
phasized education as a national duty and sug
gested a university, and in his last speech to Con
gress he again called attention to the need of a
national university and a military academy. Part
of his intention has been satisfactorily carried out
in the Military Academy at West Point on the
Hudson and in the Naval Academy at Annapolis
on Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps because Washing
ton had been untrained in military science when he
was called upon to lead the Continental Army
against the most powerful nation in the world, he
fully appreciated the value of such training. " The
art of war," he declared, "is at once comprehen
sive and complicated; it demands much previ
ous study," and he advocated preparedness by
recommending to Congress that "however pacific
the general policy of a nation may be, it ought
never to be without an adequate stock of military
knowledge for emergencies."

The Military Academy at West Point was defi
nitely opened on July 4, 1802, by President Jeffer
son with ten cadets present. Since then it has been
in continuous activity with the exception of the
war year of 1812. It has furnished the regular

100 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

army with most of its officers in all American wars
and further has given to the country many of its
leading technicians and superintendents of public
works, for it was, until the opening of the Rensse-
laer Polytechnic Institute in 1825, the only en
gineering school in the United States. West Point,
during most of its existence, has received young
men from each congressional district, and this dis
tribution of students has made the American army
a truly national and popular organization and has
thus achieved one of the aims of Washington's
ideal of education. When the United States en
tered the Great War young men of draft age who
were not needed for immediate service were placed
at Government expense in the universities of their
choice and received intensive military and naval
training under West Point officers, supplemented
by lectures on the causes of the war and on techni
cal subjects by instructors from the regular faculty.
It is already apparent that the experience gained
from this Student Army Training Corps is des
tined to modify American educational methods in
the future.

In this way Washington's desire for military
education has been realized. The other part of his
idea, a national university, came near being carried

WASHINGTON AND EDUCATION 101

out by the aid of Jefferson. In 1794 t.here ajrose an
opportunity to import en mews* a European uni
versity. The faculty of Geneva, feeling ' uncom
fortable in the Swiss Republic, proposed to emi
grate in a body to the United States if a place could
be found for them. John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson were much taken with the idea and urged
it upon Washington in the hope of getting his Poto
mac shares for that purpose, but this scheme of
wholesale importation did not fall in with Wash
ington's notion. He preferred to pick his pro
fessors from various countries — for instance, a
Scotchman rather than a Frenchman for philos
ophy — instead of bringing over a body of foreign
ers who would have to teach in French or Latin.
So what might have proved an interesting experi
ment in transplanting education was never tried,
and it will never be known whether the famous
university would have prospered on the Potomac
as it has on the Rhone.

Washington and Jefferson worked together on
the educational problem with as much harmony
as could be expected of men of such different tem
peraments. There is no necessary conflict between
State and national education. The State Uni
versities have fought hard for a national university

102 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

at Washington. In 1890 John W. Hoyt, first
President of the University of Wyoming, revived
the agitation. President Andrew D. White of
Cornell, President Edmund J. James of Illinois,
and other equally prominent educators have
worked for such an institution. It has been en
dorsed by the National Association of State Uni
versities and by the National Educational Asso
ciation. The legislatures of Western States have
petitioned for it. Washington, Jefferson, Madison,
Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Grant, Hayes, and
later Presidents have urged it upon Congress, and
Committees of the Senate and House have re
ported favorably. But, as President James of
Illinois remarked: "Private institutions, religious
and secular, have opposed, thus far successfully,
the movement." Western opinion has been dis
posed to ascribe this opposition to the Eastern
universities, which grew out of colleges modeled
after the private schools of England. The West
drew its inspiration from German and French
sources and has come to regard all education, from
the elementary to the graduate school, as a public
function. From this point of view the educational
system appears to need a national university to
complete its symmetry.

WASHINGTON AND EDUCATION 103

A dream may be fulfilled in various ways. The
national university foreseen by Washington is still
in the future. But the large endowed universities
in the East fulfill Washington's ideal by drawing
together students from all parts of the United
States. The proportion of American students now
going abroad for their education is not great enough
to endanger the national ideals. Furthermore the
Federal Government is carrying on many of the
functions of such an institution in a way that
would have pleased Washington and shocked
Jefferson. Some sixty million dollars of national
funds are now appropriated annually for agricul
tural education and experimentation, for the naval
and military academies, for Indian schools, and
for departments that are largely occupied with
scientific research and the diffusion of knowledge,
such as the Bureaus of Education, Ethnology,
Mines, Fisheries, Standards, the Library of Con
gress, Naval Observatory, Public Health Service,
National Museum, Zoological Park, Smithsonian
Institution, and the Coast and Geodetic Survey,

CHAPTER VIII

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC

Be it remembered that Uncle Sam is an undoubted friend of
public education, although so sadly deficient in his own. ... It
was, therefore, democratically believed, and loudly insisted on,
that as the State had freely received, it should freely give; and
that "larnin, even the most powerfullest highest larnin," should
at once be bestowed on everybody! and without a farthing's
expense! — Baynard Rush Hall (1821i).

IT is impossible to understand anything about the
American schools of the early half of the nineteenth
century without bearing in mind the political con
ditions and ideals which determined their organiza
tion, standard, course of study, equipment, text
books, and administration. The political revolu
tion which abolished the colonial tie with Great
Britain abolished also the colonial habit of mind
and forced the American people henceforth to find
in their own institutions the stimulus to popular
education instead of depending upon the example
of the mother country.

The still more important peaceful revolution

104

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 105

which subsequently abolished property qualifica
tions for the suffrage in the various States and
made most offices within the gift of the people
directly elective had also an influence on the
schools of America. In the first place, it gave a
stimulus to the ideal of universal education, be
cause, if all men were to be voters, the common
wealth must see that all children were instructed,
unless it desired that illiterates should direct the
destinies of the nation. Public schools, desirable
in colonial days, became imperative in a wholly
self-governing democracy. Another by-product
of democracy, less of an unmixed blessing than the
sentiment in favor of universal education, was the
district school system, which originated in Massa
chusetts and Connecticut and was copied in most
of the States of the Union. A "district" was the
neighborhood around a public school, and there
were usually several such districts in each "town,"
although some towns were never subdivided. The
school district is the smallest and therefore, from a
democratic standpoint, the most important of po
litical divisions. Its size is determined by the
length of the children's legs, for it must be within
walking distance of most of the pupils, not much
over a mile. The school district averaged about

106 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

four square miles in area, and the number of pupils
ranged from half a dozen to fifty or more. As the
means of transportation improved, the district
expanded into the township and county with State
supervision and national aid, until now we have
rural county high schools to which the pupils are
brought in free motor omnibuses. The money
raised by the town school tax was distributed
among the districts in various ways — according
to the population, the number of children of school
age, or the amount paid by the district in taxes, or
on a basis of equality. In 1827 a Massachusetts
law empowered district committeemen to care for
the school property and select the teacher. This
act, according to one writer, represented "the
high-water mark of modern democracy, and the
low- water mark of the public school system." It
meant the passing of school control from the expert
and the official to the parent and the neighbor.

The faults of the district school system are ob
vious. If a self-made man has a hard struggle to
get an education, so has a self-made community.
Nothing could be introduced into the curriculum
that the district did not regard as "practical," and
this usually meant only the three R's and spelling,
grammar, and geography. Novel methods were

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 107

viewed with as much dislike as new studies, and
new text-books were regarded as out of the ques
tion until the old ones had been worn out by
decades of continuous use. To save the cost of
a skilled teacher's wages, the district commonly
hired, without regard to other considerations, the
cheapest person who could produce a certificate,
unless some man powerful in local politics had a
relative for whom he desired the place. The very
districts that needed good schools most were from
their ignorance least conscious of the need. As a
result the progressive districts raised the level of
public instruction from generation to generation,
while the schools in other districts went from bad
to worse. This contrast was most marked in
States where there was no general system of super
vision. In Delaware, for example, an educational
convention declared in 1843 that "the school of
every district is in the power of its school voters;
they can have as good a school as they please, or an
inferior school, or no school."

According to modern standards the school equip
ment of those days was usually unspeakably bad.
The schoolhouse was the same sort of wooden
box which had done duty in colonial times;
there was the same lack of globes, maps, pictures,

108 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

blackboards, and decorations; there were the same
congested wooden benches; the same red hot stove
kept the pupils in the front benches overheated
while the children in the back of the room were
shivering in the draft from the window — some
times broken but never open. One change there
was : slates came into general use after the Revolu
tionary War and became ideal instruments for
formal exercises in arithmetic and quite informal
ventures in portraiture.

The harsh school discipline known to tradition
was long retained in most American communities^
even after some European countries had largely
abandoned the rod in favor of milder measures.
But the teacher was not wholly to blame for this
conservatism. The American boy began the prac^
tice of liberty and equality rather too early in life
for the peace of mind of the old-time pedagogue.
The strict bonds of social custom and an early
training in reverence for rank and place made
obedience natural to the German child and even
to the boy of seventeenth century Massachusetts.
But deference and decorum. were not the cardinal
virtues of American democracy in the days of
Jackson. In certain of the frontier settlements
uo teacher was secure of his place until he had

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 109

knocked down three or four overgrown, mischief-
loving lads who had challenged his authority.
Sometimes an unpopular teacher would find his
schoolroom door barred, or the chimney stopped
up, or an impromptu holiday enforced in some
other ingenious fashion. Those who criticize the
rule of the rod in the district school of a past gen
eration sometimes forget with what conditions the
teacher then had to contend.

The best feature of the district system was not
its influence on the children but its effect on the
community. In other countries the public school
has been regarded as a benevolent institution run
by some far-off entity, the state, and the private
school has been looked upon as a convenient place
to send the son or daughter who was in the way at
home. But the American public schools stood not
only for education of the people but for education
by the people. The very fact that the school stood
on no higher level than the people it reached robbed
education of that touch of aloofness and conscious
condescension always irritating to the uneducated
man who has instruction imposed upon him or
his children. The election of a school board, the
choice of a new teacher, the ceremonies of " quar
ter days" and commencements, were red-letter

110 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

occasions to the village or farming region which
supported the local school.

The early schoolhouse served also as a sort of
community center — a " meeting-house " for church
services, for political assemblies, and for "socia
bles." Here the community gathered for any
corporate action, and the women naturally took
part in the deliberations as well as the men. Out
of this school meeting grew the more complex po
litical organization of the community, still preserv
ing some of its original characteristics. Thus we
find that women voted at school elections in many
States long before they could vote for President.

In the pioneer country school the pupils ranged
from ABC children to girls who had been three
times through the arithmetic or boys who were
being coached for college, while the spelling-bees,
singing-schools, and debating societies constituted
what might be called the "extension department"
of the country school. Parents visited the school
at every convenient opportunity to see with their
own eyes how their money was being spent and
how their children were getting along. The spell
ing-bee was not a mere drill to impress certain facts
upon the plastic memory of youth. It was also one
of the recreations of adult life, if recreation be the

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 111

right word for what was taken so seriously by
every one. The spectacle of a school trustee stand
ing with a blue-backed Webster open in his hand
while gray-haired men and women, one row being
captained by the schoolmaster and the rival team
by the minister, spelled each other down is one
that it would be hard to reproduce under a more
centralized and less immediately popular form of
school government.

Secondary education in America has undergone
a curious development. During the colonial period
the Latin grammar school dominated instruction
beyond the primary grades, whereas in our time
the public high school is the leading type. Both
these institutions were public. But for a long
period, which may roughly be indicated as lying
between the Revolution and the Civil War, the
Latin Grammar school remained as a survival of
another age while the high school was gradually
beginning to assume its place as part of the educa
tional system of the nation. The private academy
meanwhile provided the link between elementary
school and college.

The academy, the name of which is taken from
the Athenian groves where Plato walked and

112 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

talked with his pupils, was developed in England
in the seventeenth century to meet the needs of the
nonconformists, who were not allowed to graduate
at Oxford and Cambridge. The earliest American
academies were also substitutes for college rather
than preparatory schools for college. The first
American academy to bear the name was char
tered at Philadelphia in 1753 and became in later
years the University of Pennsylvania. The Phil
lips Academies at Andover, Massachusetts, and at
Exeter, New Hampshire, on the other hand re
mained secondary institutions; and still others be
came "finishing schools" for those who required a
rapid rounding off and polishing of their education.
The great merit of the academies lay in adding
breadth and variety to the course of study. The old
Latin schools which they had largely displaced
taught little but the classics and taught them as
grammar rather than as literature. But in the
early years of the nineteenth century an academy
would offer "all the branches of English, classical,
mathematical, and philosophical literature which
are taught in the universities, together with the
French language if required." The girls' acade
mies — usually known by the atrocious title of
" female seminaries " — went even further and

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 113

taught many subjects which no college of the day
would have dreamed of providing any more than
it would of admitting the girls themselves. In addi
tion to rhetoric, elocution, history, logic, philoso
phy, grammar, spelling, Latin, French, astronomy,
and geography "with the use of the globes," the
female seminaries gave instruction in needlework,
drawing, painting, fancy embroidery, and music.
In the latter half of the century girls were particu
larly fond of botany, which consisted at first chiefly
in gathering and pressing flowers and in running
down their scientific names by means of the key in
Gray or Wood. Boys were afforded an opportu
nity to study such practical branches as surveying
and bookkeeping.

Such opportunities for obtaining pleasant and
perhaps profitable learning as the academies
offered did not leave the community indifferent.
In Massachusetts there were 112 academies char
tered by 1840, although a few of these existed only
on paper. In Virginia at the opening of the Civil
War there were thirteen thousand pupils enrolled
in the academies of the State. Some academies
maintained the highest standards of scholarship.
Others were mere catch-penny enterprises that
grew rich by retailing appetizing "extras," such

114 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

as instruction in Italian or in some special variety
of decorative art. Many academies, including
those attended by girls, were practically normal
schools and offered the best training then available
for those who intended to become teachers. On
the whole, America owes much to the academy.
It gave to many thousand young men and women
an introduction to art, science, literature, and phi
losophy that proved an inspiration to a life from
which these elements would otherwise have been
lacking. By its emphasis on the study of the Eng
lish language the academy had much to do with
making this a nation of fluent speakers and ready
writers. Even its worst feature, the overcrowded
curriculum, helped by its very multiplicity to in
troduce the elective idea into secondary education.
As private institutions the academies, though
frequently subsidized from the "school fund" or
"literary fund" of the State, were supported in
part by students' fees. This arrangement, how
ever, restricted secondary education to those who
could afford to pay tuition and was felt to be un
democratic. Moreover, after the establishment of
the State Universities, it was considered inconsist
ent for the public to charge itself with the teach
ing of children in the elementary schools and of

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 115

men and women in the colleges while leaving the
intermediate years wholly to private enterprise and
benevolence. Somehow or other the State should
provide free secondary education. The solution
was finally reached in the establishment of the
high school.

Again Boston took the lead in a new educational
movement. The English Classical School for
Boys was opened in 1821 as an alternative to the
old Latin Grammar school with its rigid and nar
row course of study. Five years later a high school
for girls was started in the same city. In 1826 the
Massachusetts Legislature passed a law requir
ing townships of five hundred or more households
to provide instruction in American history, book
keeping, geometry, surveying, and algebra. Thus
there was established a system of high schools in
the important towns of the State, although some
towns evaded the requirement as long as they were
able to do so. High schools were also started in
New York and Philadelphia soon after the Boston
experiment and independently of it.

The academies looked upon the high schools as
intruders and upon the new system as a socialistic
invasion of the field of private enterprise. The
taxpayers in many places objected to paying for

116 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the education of other people's children beyond the
elementary branches, and it was only through a
maze of legal controversies that the high schools
finally forced their way to public recognition and
approval. After the Civil War the high schools
increased very rapidly in numbers in all parts of
the country until now they form an ineradicable
and perhaps the most characteristic part of the
American educational system.

In the chief educational systems of Europe the
secondary school is not placed on top of an eight
years' course in the elementary school but runs
parallel to it above the primary grades, very much
as our colonial Latin schools used to do. The
German father, for example, who is ambitious for
his son's career, transfers him at the end of three
or four years from the elementary school to some
school which will fit him for future success in in
dustry or commerce or will prepare him after nine
years' study for the university. Each social class
has its own type of school leading to a goal certain
and definite from the start. But in the United
States a secondary school has a double function : it
must with the same curriculum prepare some of its
students for higher education, but it must also
prepare others for a life in which they may have

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 117

no further formal schooling. That is why the high
schools repeat much of the work of the elementary
schools, why the colleges give courses already in
cluded in the high school, and why there is an end
less conflict between the colleges and the secondary
schools as to the requirements for admission to the
former. It is the price that Americans pay for
their insistence that the children of the well-to-do
shall be educated together with the children of the
poor. Perhaps the social gain in the development
of democratic sentiment is worth the educational
loss in delaying the entrance to college of those who
reach it by way of "the grades."

The introduction of text-books which were
neither imported from English publishing houses
nor written in close imitation of trans-Atlantic
models became a potent factor in Americanizing
the school. Of these the works of Noah Webster
were perhaps the most widely influential in mold
ing the ideas of the first generations of children
born under the flag of the Republic. Webster's
famous speller was the offspring of the necessity
of the Revolutionary War. "In the year 1782,"
wrote the author, "while the American army was
lying on the banks of the Hudson I kept a classi
cal school at Goshen, N. Y. The country was

118 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

impoverished : intercourse with Great Britain was
interrupted, and schoolbooks were scarce and
hardly attainable." His Grammatical Institute of
the English Language, published the following
year, was a combined reader, spelling-book, and
grammar. The sale of the speller supplied him
with enough to live on while he worked on his dic
tionary. He brought out in 1806 the first edition
of the dictionary and in 1828 appeared the work
that became universally known as Webster9 s Un
abridged. There had been not a few text-book
writers in the colonies but none had ventured so
boldly upon innovations nor emphasized the pa
triotic motive so constantly. His enemies have
charged Noah Webster with creating an Ameri
can language distinct from English, by simplify
ing English spelling and recognizing changes in
pronunciation. His friends replied that but for
the use of his books by schools in every part of
the country the nation might have been divided
by dialects and there would have been not one
American language but a dozen.

There can certainly be no question as to the
nature of Webster's intentions or the extent of his
influence. The aim of his speller was, he said, "to
diffuse an uniformity and purity of language in

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 119

America, to destroy the provincial prejudices that
originate in the trifling difference of dialect and
produce reciprocal ridicule." In the advertise
ment to his reader he declared: "I consider it a
culpable fault in our books that the books gener
ally used contain subjects wholly uninteresting
to our youth; while the writings which marked
the Revolution, which are, perhaps, not infe
rior to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes,
and which are calculated to impress interesting
truths upon young minds, lie neglected and for
gotten." By 1818 Webster's speller alone had
sold over five million copies; by 1847, twenty-
four million. Its total sales by this time probably
exceed seventy-five million and it is still selling
by the hundred thousand a year in spite of a
thousand competitors which have sprung up since
its publication.

The same patriotic purpose was evident in the
geographies of Jedediah Morse and his contem
poraries. Geography a hundred years ago did not
have the narrow and special meaning now attached
to it; it covered all sorts of information which it
was thought interesting or useful for the child to
know. According to an announcement of the time,
a good geography would give an account of the

120 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

*' religion, military strength, literature, curiosities,
constitution, and history" of every country in the
world. The United States received due considera
tion, nor was the author ashamed to make its
place a high one. Of the Americans he remarked
that "the people generally are enterprising, indus
trious, persevering, and submissive to government.
They are also intelligent, brave, active, and benevo
lent, and possess a strength and agility of body
which are seldom united in so great a degree. . . .
Upon the whole, the manners of the people of the
United States . . . are, probably, a medium be
tween an honest bluntness on the one hand,
and a sickly delicacy on the other."1 The same
author goes on to speak of "the present manly
ease of freemen," a quality to which Dickens
and other European travelers preferred to give a
different name.

When the South attempted to establish its Con
federacy, it declared at the same time its independ
ence of the New England text-book. There was,
for example, A Geography for Beginners, published
in 1864 by the Reverend K. J. Stewart, which in
cluded maps showing the Confederate States of

1 A History of the United States of America, by Chauncey A.
Goodrich (1833), p. 523.

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC

America and special articles on such topics as the
flora and the scenery of the Confederate States.
It shows little trace of the passions of the Civil
War then raging, but it comments with amusing
sharpness on the patronizing attitude adopted by
Europeans to Americans of both North and South.
Speaking of the upper classes of Great Britain, the
author remarks that, "as a class of men, they are
superior to any similar class of other nations, un
less it be among men of the same race in the States
of America, who, with the exception of titles,
resemble them very much, and are not at all
their inferiors."

In considering the factors which gave the young
republic a culture which affected all classes to a
more uniform degree than was the case of any
other civilized country of the time, the press must
be regarded as the most important of text-books.
This was recognized as early as 1740 by John
Clarke in an Essay upon the Education of. Youth in
Grammar Schools in which he advocated the teach
ing of geography and history in addition to the
classics. "By that time boys are fit to be entered
in Greek or sooner," said he, "it may be convenient
to bring them acquainted with the Public News,
by making them read the Evening Post or some

AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

other newspaper constantly. These the master
may at first read along with them, explaining, as
occasion offers, the Terms of War, and whatever
else he apprehends they do not understand." This
was an anticipation of one of the most recent inno
vations in teaching. At the present time millions
of copies of dailies, weeklies, and monthlies are
used in American classrooms in the study of cur
rent events, civics, and history. Yet then, as to
day, there were critics of American journalism and
its influence. One writer held that American
mediocrity was due to "the unequaled circulation
of newspapers and magazines of every possible
description, as well as the variety and profusion of
other productions that come daily and hourly reek
ing from the press,"1 and drew the pessimistic
inference that "in proportion as the facilities of
learning and means of investigation are multiplied,
in the same degree men seem to lose sight of more
noble pursuits, and become continually more ab
sorbed in those which only call into exercise
their meaner faculties." The truth seems to have
been about half-way between this harsh censure
and the spread-eagleism of the writer of patriotic

1 Causes of the Backward State of Sound Learning of the United
States, by Charles H. Lyon (1838).

SCHOOLS OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 123

geographies. But all observers admitted the fact
that no social class was so high or so low as to be
outside the influence of the little red schoolhouse,
the blue-backed speller, and the newspaper.

CHAPTER IX

HORACE MANN AND THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

Horace Mann is by general consent the greatest educator that
this western hemisphere has produced. — A. E. Winship.

HORACE MANN was the type of leader who so
stamps his personality upon a great movement of
reform that no one can think of it apart from him.
He spent but a comparatively short period of his
life in the actual work of teaching and, unlike such
educational pioneers as Rousseau or Pestalozzi,
he contributed no new theory or method to the
science of pedagogy. Sometimes the need of the
age is for a man of boundless energy, enthusiasm,
and consecration who can make millions of men
heed the truths already discerned by a small circle
of special students. Horace Mann was the instiga
tor, the promoter, one might almost say the press
agent, of modern ideals of education.

Horace Mann was born in 1796 at Franklin,
Massachusetts, and dug the only really valuable

124

HORACE MANN 125

part of his early education out of the books in
the town library founded by Benjamin Frank
lin. Fortunately for him a private schoolmaster,
Samuel Barrett, took an interest in the lad and
encouraged him to go to college. Within six
months he learned enough Latin and Greek to
enter the sophomore class of Brown University,
although up to that time he had never studied
either language. This furious cramming, however,
injured his health and compelled him to work for
the rest of his life under a physical handicap.
Indeed, it was always the habit of Mann to plunge
into a, task with a reckless fury that left his nerves
and his temper in rags by the time the work was
completed. "Work," he once said, "has always
been to me what water is to a fish. I have won
dered a thousand times to hear people say, 'I don't
like this business ' ; or, * I wish I could exchange for
that'; for with me, whenever I have had anything
to do, I do not remember ever to have demurred,
but have always set about it like a fatalist; and it
was as sure to be done as the sun is to set."

After Horace Mann graduated from college, he
remained for a short time as a tutor at Brown and
then took up the study of law. He outdistanced
his fellow lawyers by the same grim intensity of

126 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

effort that had awed his instructors in college, and
in 1827 he entered the Massachusetts Legislature.
A clear pathway to political fame lay before him,
the more so as he had the gift of oratory which was
then valued above all others as a key to public
honors. Had his career not been deflected into
other channels, Massachusetts might have had in
him another Webster or another Sumner, though
it is safe to say that as a statesman he would have
been less of an opportunist than the former and of
more balanced judgment than the latter. But in
1837, when President of the State Senate, he re
signed all his political prospects to accept the post
of secretary to the newly created State Board
of Education.

It is hard to say whether the friends of Horace
Mann or the friends of the Board of Education
were the more surprised and disappointed at his
action. Horace Mann's friends, with few excep
tions, tried to dissuade him from taking this
humble office. To some who said that the position
of Secretary to the Board was not one of sufficient
dignity, he replied: "If the title is not sufficiently
honorable now, then it is clearly left for me to ele
vate it; and I had rather be creditor than debtor
to the title." Others, more practical, urged that it

HORACE MANN 127

was sheer madness for one of the best lawyers of
Massachusetts to give his whole time in exchange
for a beggarly $1500 a year. "Well, one thing is
certain," said Mann. "If I live, and have health,
I will be revenged on them; I will do them more
than $1500 worth of good."

On the other hand, some were displeased that
Horace Mann had been selected for the office.
They had nothing to say against him personally,
except that he was not an educator by profession,
but in their hearts they had hoped that James G.
Carter, whose untiring devotion had established
the principle of State supervision in Massachusetts,
would become Secretary of the Board of Educa
tion which he had virtually created. But Mann,
who as a member of the Legislature had already
shown much interest in legislation affecting the
schools, took his new duties very seriously and
read as much as he could on educational theory
in the intervals of his practical work.

The chief duty of the Secretary of the Board of
Education at that time was to prepare an annual
report on the schools of Massachusetts for the in
formation of the Board and the Legislature. Mere
ly the routine work of compiling an abstract of
school returns was enough to keep one person

128 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

fairly busy, but Mann resolved to make each re
port also a battle in the campaign for more ade
quate teaching. His particular target was the dis
trict system of school government, and his criti
cisms did more than anything else to arouse the
country to the need of central supervision of the
local schools.

In addition to preparing the twelve reports
which he issued as Secretary, Mann aroused public
interest in educational problems by lectures before
teachers' conventions and public meetings of all
sorts. He toured every part of the State, arous
ing and inspiring teachers with a sense of the op
portunities before them for accomplishing great
and enduring work. With the same object of ele
vating the teacher's occupation he established
the Common School Journal and encouraged the
organization of teachers' institutes.

Even more significant was Horace Mann's work
in behalf of teachers' training. In 1838 Edmund
Dwight, a friend of Horace Mann, offered ten
thousand dollars towards a normal school on con
dition that the Massachusetts Legislature would
vote an equal sum. In the following year the first
public normal school in America was opened at
Lexington. Cyrus Pierce of Nan tucket, who was

HORACE MANN 129

selected by Mann for its principal, bravely under
took the new work, although at first only three
students were in attendance. From such small
beginnings grew the normal school system of the
United States which now controls the standards
of teaching throughout the country. But the
voters viewed this innovation with a certain dis
trust. It was then generally held that anybody
who knew a fact could teach it, or that at least he
could learn how to do so in the course of practice.
The men of that generation were not perhaps al
together \vrong in thinking that teaching was the
best school for a teacher, but Horace Mann and
his fellow reformers thought it wasteful to sacrifice
the interests of the children in order that the
schoolmaster might acquire through experience
some inklings of the mistakes to avoid and the best
methods to follow.

Another innovation introduced by Horace Mann
was the teaching of music in public schools. Pri
vate instruction in singing and piano playing was,
of course, nothing new, but it was something of
an achievement to convince the taxpayer that
public funds should be used for instruction in any
thing so far removed from the "practical." All
that Mann was able to contribute to the movement

130 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

for adding music to the course of study was his
encouragement and championship, his influence
with the authorities and the general public. The
actual organization of musical teaching was due to
his friend Lowell Mason, whose name is still re
membered with gratitude by all lovers of music.
"It is well worth walking ten miles to hear a lesson
by Lowell Mason," said Horace Mann, and he saw
to it that the teachers in the normal schools and
institutes had the benefit of Mason's inspiring
instruction.

Horace Mann's attempts to introduce reforms
into common school education and his unsparing
attacks on existing conditions made enemies as
well as friends. But it was not until the publica
tion of his seventh report, in 1843, that the mur
murs of conservative criticism swelled to a storm.
The charge brought against him was lack of pa
triotism because he held up European schools,
particularly those of Germany, as models for
America. Much unsympathetic European criti
cism had made the young republic somewhat
sensitive to comparisons drawn between the old
world and the new unless they were wholly fa
vorable. The men of Massachusetts were particu
larly proud of their schools, which had a long and

HORACE MANN 131

honorable tradition behind them and were still
perhaps the best in the United States, and they
were therefore little inclined to take hints from
foreigners. Horace Mann well understood this
sensitiveness, and he therefore attempted to fore
stall hostile criticism by remarking in his report:
"Wherever I have found the best institutions . . .
there I have always found the greatest desire to
know how similar institutions were administered
among ourselves; and, where I have found the
worst, there I have found most of the spirit of self-
complacency, and even an offensive disinclination
to hear of better methods."

In order to gather the materials for his annual
report Horace Mann took a five months' "vaca
tion." This he spent in studying foreign schools
and philanthropic institutions, about which he
prepared a veritable encyclopedia of facts. During
that brief interval he "visited England, Ireland,
and Scotland; crossed the German Ocean to Ham
burg; thence went to Magdeburg, Berlin, Pots
dam, Halle, and Weissenfels, in the Kingdom of
Prussia; to Leipsic and Dresden . . . thence to Er
furt, Weimar, Eisenach . . . thence to the Grand
Duchy of Nassau, of Hesse-Darmstadt, and of
Baden; and, after visiting all the principal cities

132 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

in the Rhenish Provinces of Prussia, passed
through Holland and Belgium to Paris."

Of all the schools which he visited while abroad
Horace Mann found the Prussian schools the best.
In the first place, the system of administration was
sound. Attendance was compulsory and rigidly
enforced; the schools were carefully graded, and
each teacher had but one class in his room; the
school inspectors were men of the type who in this
country would be judges or college presidents; and
each teacher received a thorough professional
training. He noticed, also, improved methods of
instruction. Reading was taught by the "word
method" instead of by requiring the children first
to learn the alphabet, then to combine letters in
syllables, and finally to build up words from these
elements, according to the usual American practice.
Foreign languages were taught by being used in the
classroom; geography and nature study were pre
sented in a way that children could comprehend;
and drawing was begun as early as writing.

All these minor perfections, however, mattered
little to him by comparison with the fine sympathy
between teacher and pupil and the cordial delight
which the teacher took in his work. The classroom
was a place alive with activity. In Prussia, as also

HORACE MANN 133

in Saxony and Scotland, Mann said, no teacher
could hold his place unless he had the power to
interest the children and attract their attention at
all times. Speaking of his travels in Prussia and
Saxony, he remarked:

1. During all this time, I never saw a teacher hearing
a lesson of any kind (except a reading or spelling
lesson) with a book in his hand.

2. I never saw a teacher sitting while hearing a
recitation.

3. Though I saw hundreds of schools, and thousands
— I think I may say, within bounds, tens of thou
sands — of pupils, / never saw one child undergoing
punishment, or arraigned for misconduct.

Although Horace Mann mingled his praise of
foreign schools with abundant criticism, a com
mittee of thirty-one Boston grammar school
teachers, conceiving that he had insulted the
Massachusetts school system, prepared an elabo
rate attack on his report. They accused Mann of
ignorance of the schools of his own State and of
neglecting his duties of inspection to follow his
hobbies and impractical theories. They defended
the use of corporal punishment, the old-fashioned
method of teaching children to read, and most of
the other practices of which he had spoken with
disapproval. They objected chiefly to his insist-

134 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

ence on keeping the children interested in their
studies, because, in their opinion, unless a child
learned to work at dull or distasteful tasks "mental
discipline" would be lost.

These remarks on his report, and especially the
offensive and deliberately insulting language in
which they were couched, so infuriated Mann that
he replied in another pamphlet which fairly flamed
with indignation that helpless children should
have such stupid instructors. To this Reply to the
Remarks on his Report there came a Rejoinder, and
to that again an Answer. It is not worth while
following the long drawn out controversy further
than to say that Mann's superiority as a debater
was as evident throughout as his superior wisdom
in educational matters. He not only was the victor,
but the whole country was aware of it.

In 1848 Horace Mann left his post. During the
twelve years he was Secretary to the Board of
Education the appropriation for public schools in
the State had doubled; two million dollars had
been spent to improve school buildings; the sala
ries of teachers were increased by more than half;
a month was added to the ordinary length of the
school year; and three flourishing normal schools
were founded. As a token of public appreciation,

HORACE MANN 135

the Massachusetts Legislature voted Horace Mann
a special compensation of two thousand dollars
above his salary and also gave him a formal vote of
thanks for the efficient manner in which he had
filled the post of Secretary. During the same year
he was elected to Congress from the constituency
which had been represented by ex-President John
Quincy Adams. His chief interest in the House of
Representatives was the anti-slavery cause, and
his political career is most widely known by his
quarrel with Daniel Webster and the other con
servative Whigs who were willing to compromise
with the slavery interest.

For the second time in his life Mann abandoned
politics for education. After serving two terms in
Congress he became President of Antioch College
in Ohio and carried into the West the same message
of educational reform that he had preached in
Massachusetts. Antioch was one of the earliest
experiments in higher education for both men and
women and for students of all races. But the
college did not greatly prosper, chiefly for lack of
financial backing, and Horace Mann's death in
1859 was hastened by overwork and worry.

Like all the great New Englanders of his genera
tion, Horace Mann had many enthusiasms which

136 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

those who did not share them called fads. He
hated with an equal hatred ignorance, slavery,
drink, tobacco, war, and Calvinism. He believed
firmly in phrenology. He was as interested in
institutions for the insane, the blind, the deaf, and
the criminal as he was in schools for normal chil
dren. In a word, he was a universal educational
reformer dominated at every moment of his life
by a sleepless conscience. He was no fanatic — or,
more exactly, he was the most formidable kind of
fanatic, for he could wait as well as strike. Wen
dell Phillips denounced him for not joining the
extreme abolitionists, and Theodore Parker ac
cused him of concealing his Unitarian beliefs from
his orthodox associates at Antioch. Parker re
marked that Horace Mann did not know that in
morals as well as in mathematics a straight line
is the shortest distance between two points; but
some of us would agree rather with Mann that
the longest way around is frequently the shortest
way home.

Horace Mann was but one of the educational
leaders of his day, and there is a limit to what one
man, even the busiest, can accomplish. His real
importance lies in his relation to other men whom
be inspired to carry on and extend his task of

HORACE MANN 137

reforming the schools. The excellent public schools
of far-away Argentina, for instance, owe much to
the fact that President Sarmiento had studied the
work of Horace Mann during his travels in the
United States. Sometimes, indeed, Sarmiento is
spoken of as "the Horace Mann of South America."
There is no more striking proof of the extent of
Mann's influence than the number of persons who
have been labeled " the Horace Mann of " whatever
place may have been the scene of their labors. It
is the usual biographer's distinguishing tag for a
prominent American educator, just as people speak
of "the Belgian Shakespeare" or "the Danish
Shakespeare " in paying a supreme tribute to a man
of letters.

The man whose career most closely parallels
that of Horace Mann and whose achievements
were of at least equal importance in themselves,
though not perhaps so widely influential, was
Henry Barnard. After graduating at Yale, he
traveled abroad and studied the schools of Ger
many and Switzerland. Upon his return to Amer
ica he was elected to the Connecticut Legislature,
as Horace Mann was elected to that of Massachu
setts. Like Mann, again, he deserted law and
politics to become Secretary of the State Board of

138 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Education. While occupying this position he or
ganized the first teachers' institutes held in Amer
ica and edited the Connecticut Common School
Journal. Rhode Island also owes a debt of grati
tude to Barnard. The Connecticut Legislature in
a moment of reaction abolished the Board of Edu
cation (or, as it was called, the Board of Com
missioners of Common Schools) and thus Henry
Barnard lost his position. Rhode Island seized
the opportunity to obtain his services to organize
its public schools. Repentant Connecticut soon
recalled him to his old position but not before he
had worked a revolution in the Rhode Island school
system. Like Horace Mann, he spent some years
in the Middle West. For two years he was Chan
cellor of the University of Wisconsin and, while
there, did much to organize training for teachers
throughout that State. After serving the cause of
education in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wiscon
sin, and Maryland, where he was President of St.
John's College at Annapolis, Barnard became the
first United States Commissioner of Education.

The great achievement of Henry Barnard, how
ever, lay not in administration but in authorship.
For more than thirty years he was editor of The
American Journal of Education, which was really a

HORACE MANN 139

serial encyclopedia of educational theory and prac
tice. In it were included a large proportion of
the most important articles and monographs ever
written about education. But the expense of the
undertaking was so great that Barnard, after losing
more than $40,000 on it, was compelled to abandon
it, and the costly plates would have been melted
into type metal if William T. Harris had not
organized a corporation to save the series.

The work accomplished by Horace Mann in
Massachusetts and by Henry Barnard in Connecti
cut and Rhode Island was typical of that done by
hundreds of other men of the same generation who
served the interests of education not as teachers
but as the statesmen of the schools. It was an
age when the expert, the superintendent, the
administrator first found a distinctive place in the
common task of combating ignorance. The in
dividual commander, such as the college president
or school principal, was now aided by a "general
staff" or boards of education, school inspectors,
and normal school directors. Many a small boy
sitting in a bright, well-aired, warm room at his
individual desk, with an attractively illustrated
geography open before him, and pleasant memo
ries of the school garden or the camera club in his

140 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

thoughts, owes the best features of his education
not to his teacher but to some busy superintendent
who could not have made a success in teaching
even a district school but who could and did de
vote his life to perfecting the school system. The
best of these men, however, like Horace Mann,
never made the machinery of education an end in
itself, but kept steadily in mind the boys and girls
for whose benefit it was all called into being.

CHAPTER X

DE WITT CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL

Ten years of the life of a child may now be spent in a common
school. In two years the elements of instruction may be acquired
and the remaining eight years must now be spent in repetition or
idleness, unless the teachers of the common schools are competent
to instruct in the higher branches of knowledge. The outlines of
geography, algebra, mineralogy, agriculture, chemistry, mechani-
pal philosophy, surveying, geometry, astronomy, political econ
omy and ethics might be communicated by able preceptors with
out essential interference with the calls of domestic industry. —
De Witt Clinton.

MASSACHUSETTS is typical of those States which,
having a democratic system of public instruction,
sought to make it efficient; New York is a good
example of those States which, having a sys
tem of public instruction that recognized class
distinctions, sought to make it democratic. In
New England the chief battleground was the ques
tion of expert supervision over the district school;
in the Middle Atlantic States and in some parts
of the South the great issue was the abolition
of the distinction between "pay" pupils and

141

142 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

those who, by a kind of charity, were given their
tuition free.

Of course, the question of expert supervision
has also been an important one in New York, but
in one sense it may be said that the supervision
was older than the schools. Nowhere in America
had the Revolutionary War more thoroughly un
settled what little had been accomplished for the
younger generation in colonial days. True public
schools did not exist, although a few parish schools
and academies had weathered the stormy time,
and even King's College, with its honorable record
of public service, was forced to close its doors for
several years. The revival of education under the
republic began at the top. In 1784 King's College
was reopened under the name of Columbia and was
made the center of a State educational system.
Young De Witt Clinton was the first student ma
triculated in Columbia College, and he graduated
in 1786 with the first class to receive degrees from
the institution.

By the act of 1784 a "University of the State of
New York" was created. This was not a univer
sity in the American sense of a single institution,
but in the French sense of a governing body placed
over all the colleges and schools that might be es-

CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL 143

tablished. A Board of Regents was "empowered
to found Schools and Colleges in any such part of
the State as may seem expedient to them and to
endow the same . . . directing the manner in
which such Colleges are to be governed." Georgia
had already founded a "university" of this type
and Michigan (when still a Territory) later ex
perimented even more boldly on the same lines.
But the systematic organization of all schools into
a "university" has not been widely adopted in the
United States and is nowhere fully carried out.
Even in New York, the Regents at first confined
their attention largely to Columbia College and
permitted the lesser schools to shift for themselves.
Governor George Clinton, uncle of De Witt
Clinton, did not find the educational situation
satisfactory. He praised the good work done by
the private academies but, as he told the Legisla
ture, "it cannot be denied that they are principally
confined to the children of the opulent," and he
recommended the establishment of public schools
throughout the State. The legislators somewhat
unwillingly untied the public purse strings and
granted an annual appropriation to aid towns
which started common schools. After five years
the plan was abandoned, but in 1812 a new law

144 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

established a general system of public, schools
under a State Superintendent, which was in part
supported by local tax, in part by State aid, and
in part from "rate bills" on the parents whose
children attended the schools.

In 1805, before the final establishment of a gen
eral school system for the State, a number of pub
lic-spirited citizens of New York City organized
a Free School Society to care for the poor children
who had no other means of education. In this
thriving city of more than seventy-five thousand
persons, thousands of children were growing up
without any instruction because they could not
pay to enter the private schools and because their
parents did not wish to send them to the charity
schools maintained by some of the churches. The
schools founded by the Society were, barring one
very brief and unhappy trial of the rate bill, free to
all children and not bound to any creed, but their
control remained in the hands of the Trustees of
the Society. For nearly half a century the educa
tion of the children of the most important city in
America was in charge of a private corporation.

The Free School Society, later known as the
Public School Society, was the masterpiece of De
Witt Clinton. He was the first President of its

CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL 145

Board of Trustees and he was the largest sub
scriber towards its objects. While a member of
the New York Legislature he obtained an appro
priation for the Society and opposed all attempts
to scatter among church schools the share which
belonged to New York City. No one knew better
than Clinton that the citizens should support and
control their own schools; but New York was not
yet awake to this necessity, and he therefore did
the next best thing in supporting free schools open
to every one without the taint of charity to offend
the sensitive pride of the poor. New York might
long have remained a city of illiterates if De Witt
Clinton had not been one of its citizens, and it
is but a just recognition of his services that the
largest high school in the city now bears his name.
Clinton had also much to do with the method of
teaching in the schools of the Society. He studied
the English system of pupil teaching, sometimes
called the Bell-Lancaster system from the two men
who claimed the invention of it, and favored its
adoption in American schools. The basic idea of
this system was to turn the routine of teaching
over to the older children who could teach what
they themselves had recently learned. The teacher
himself was like the superintendent of a factory:

146 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

his chief duty was to police the establishment and
see that everything went smoothly. By this ar
rangement one man sometimes took charge of five
hundred children. No quicker and cheaper method
of varnishing a large class with a knowledge of the
three R's can well be imagined; and the schoolboy
monitors, though they were not competent to give
expert instruction, were hardly expected to do so.
In those days even the "regular" teacher of the
district school was little more than a drillmaster to
keep the children in order and to hear their lessons;
and why could not a monitor do as much? Many
ingenious ideas were introduced as part of the sys
tem, such as teaching the children to read from
wall charts and to write by making letters in sand.
After Clinton's death the Public School Society
found itself more and more out of touch with the
times. The growing Irish-Catholic population of
the city demanded a share of the State funds for
their own schools, and, when met by the answer
that public money should not be used to support
sectarian schools, argued that the Public School
Society was a private organization dominated by a
Protestant atmosphere. They added their voices
— and votes — to complaints from other sources
against permitting a private legal monopoly of

CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL 147

public instruction. Governor Seward at last ex
pressed the popular discontent in his Annual
Message in 1842 and urged "the expediency of
vesting in the people of the City of New York,
what I am sure the people of no other part of the
State would, upon any consideration, relinquish —
the education of their children." The Public
School Society did not take its death sentence
quietly. Professing to fear "the blighting influ
ence of party strife and sectarian animosity" if the
schools were transferred to public control, the
Society continued for ten years to support its own
free schools in spite of the organization of public
schools known as the "ward schools." When the
two systems were finally combined into one, each
contributed several buildings and a nearly equal
number of pupils. The present city public school
system which grew out of this union is on as com
prehensive a scale as that of the largest States.
There is even a public university, the College of
the City of New York, the largest municipal col
lege in America, with a history covering seventy
years of service to the community.

De Witt Clinton's interest in education was not
confined to his work for the Public School Soci
ety. As Governor he succeeded in securing liberal

148 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

appropriations from the State Legislature, but his
programme of educational statesmanship, outlined
in his annual messages, far outranged the imagina
tion of his generation. He desired, by establishing
monitorial high schools, to develop into a corps of
professionally trained teachers the monitors who
taught under the Lancaster plan. He advocated
the higher education of women. He favored special
provision for the education of Indians and negroes.
He advised the creation of a State Board of Agri
culture to correspond with the county societies
and suggested "a professorship in agriculture con
nected with the board or attached to the univer
sity." Clinton laid special emphasis on the less
formal educational agencies — libraries, lyceums,
county agricultural associations, mechanics' in
stitutes, and all manner of literary, historical, and
philosophical societies. The educational progress
of New York has in the main followed the path
blazed by Clinton. x

Clinton did not live to see free common schools
under public control established throughout the
State. After many years of agitation the New
York Legislature passed an act in 1849 providing

1 See The Educational Views and Influence of De Witt Clinton
by Edward A. Fitzpatrick.

CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL 149

for the abolition of all school fees and for the sup
port of all common schools by local taxation with
aid from the State fund, and on referendum the
people approved the change by an overwhelming
majority. But opposition to the free school was
not yet dead. The following year the question of
repeal was submitted to the State, and the vote was
so close that the Legislature ventured to set aside
the twice repeated verdict of the majority of citi
zens and enact a compromise bill whereby a State
tax was levied on all property for the support of
the schools, retaining the rate bill to make up any
local deficit. Parents unable to pay might send
their children to school free, but this fact only em
phasized the social chasm between the rich and
the poor. Not until 1867, nearly forty years after
the death of De Witt Clinton, were the public
schools free to all.

The fight for free schools was one of the great
landmarks in the history of American democracy.
Public-spirited men urged that the interests of the
commonwealth demanded that education be uni
versal. "We hold," said The Tribune in 1850,
"that our present school tax is not imposed on the
rich for the benefit of the poor; but imposed on the
whole State for the benefit of the State." One

150 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

advocate of tax-supported education declared that
" property can better afford to educate four chil
dren in the schoolhouse than one in the street."
The workingmen of the cities strongly favored any
change that would abolish the stigma of charity
from public education, the more so that New York
City was already accustomed to the free schools
founded by the Public School Society. Many of
the other cities shouldered the burden of taxation
so willingly that there was no deficit to be made
good from the pocketbook of the parent.

In the rural districts both conditions and ideas
were different. On the referendum of 1850 forty-
two counties out of fifty-nine favored the repeal
of the law providing free schools, and nearly all
these were purely rural. The New York farmer
was not indifferent or averse to education, but he
had no experience of the free school system. " The
right of the parent" to care for his own children's
education and "the right of property" not to be
taxed for the benefit of other people prevented him
from seeing "the right of the child." The farmer
viewed with some disapproval the "fads and frills"
with which the old-time district school was being
contaminated. Resolutions voted by one rural
district, for instance, ran thus: "We are in favor of

CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL 151

a simple and plain system of popular education,
without Normal Schools, teachers' institutes, dis
trict school journals, supported by the State, or
hordes of school officers." There were also the par
tisans of the private school who were opposed to
free schools; and one Roman Catholic organ in
New York professed to fear the coming of "state
monopoly, state despotism, and state socialism"
in this once free country if public schools became
universal. Neither the example of New England
nor the arguments of Clinton could convert the
whole of New York to the benefits of the free school.
Time and experience were needed.

The free school had an even harder struggle for
existence in the Keystone State than in the Em
pire State, for in Pennsylvania the principle that
the parent should pay for the schooling of his chil
dren was reinforced by jealousies of race and creed
which were rooted in the traditions of colonial
times. The Germans in particular clung to their
own private schools, for through them they were
enabled to keep alight the flame of their ances
tral culture, which, they feared, might too easily
be extinguished by the "Anglo-Saxon" influences
of the public school. Thus in Pennsylvania, in the
early years of the nineteenth century, was seen the

152 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

curious paradox of people whose kinsmen in Ger
many at that time enjoyed the best public school
system in the world working zealously to keep the
free school out of the State in which they lived.

In 1834 there was enacted in Pennsylvania the
first law providing throughout this State schools
that were free to all as well as to those who could
not afford to pay. Private education and "pau
per" schools had left ominous gaps in the instruc
tion of the rising generation, and it has been esti
mated that in Pennsylvania alone there were in
the third decade of the century a quarter of a
million children of school age not attending any
kind of school.1 As was later the case in New
York, the law was passed without much difficulty;
but when the time came to put it into effect and
taxes consequently threatened to increase, there
was a strong agitation for its repeal. The cause
of free education was saved by Thaddeus Stev
ens, who fought for it in the Legislature with
an eloquence and fiery earnestness that at once
turned the tide of public opinion and made him a
national figure.

The law of 1834 permitted districts, if they pre
ferred going without their share of the State fund

1 Wickersham, History of Education in Pennsylvania-

CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL 153

to paying local taxes for free schools, to stand out
side of the new system. The northern counties
of the State, settled largely from New York and
New England, quickly adopted the free school,
and the workingmen of the big towns were en
thusiastic. On the other hand, the German settle
ments, many rural districts, and places where sec
tarian influence was strong and private schools
were many and good, refused for many years to
take advantage of the law.

It was, of course, unfortunate that the American
school had to make its way against the prejudices
and narrow views of economy that could not see
why a rich bachelor should be taxed to keep all the
children of the district at school. But a slow con
version is often the most lasting. No one in any
State could be found today to write in all serious
ness such an appeal as was addressed to the North
Carolina Legislature by an opponent of public
education in 1829: "Gentlemen, I hope you do not
conceive it at all necessary, that everybody should
be able to read, write, and cipher. If one is to keep
a store or a school, or to be a lawyer or physi
cian, such branches may, perhaps, be taught him;
though I do not look upon them as by any means
indispensable : but if he is to be a plain farmer, or a

154 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

mechanic, they are of no manner of use, but rather
a detriment."1

In spite of this persuasive plea, North Carolina
was converted to a belief in the public school
even before the Civil War, and most of the other
Southern States followed its example immediately
after the close of the conflict. The wealthy and
populous States of the middle Atlantic seaboard
achieved free education earlier, but only against
the strong obstacles of the well-endowed private
schools for the rich and the charity schools for the
poor which, between them, seemed to leave little
room for a democratic education. But beyond the
Ohio and the Mississippi there were new commu
nities where the free school was as much a mat
ter of course in the days of the sod hut as in
the days of the skyscraper. These frontier folk
could have little comprehension of the task that
had confronted such pioneers of democracy as
De Witt Clinton in awakening the conscience of
conservative and tradition bound communities.

1 Knight, Public School Education in North Carolina.

CHAPTER XI

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good gov
ernment and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means
of education shall forever be encouraged. — Ordinance of 1787.

I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or
modern, has produced effects of a more distinct, marked and last
ing character than the Ordinance of 1787. — Daniel Webster.

As each new State emerged from the western wil
derness, there ensued a period of local competi
tion in which rival towns strove for the possession
of the various governmental institutions. It was
commonly conceded that in the long run a uni
versity would be preferable to a penitentiary and a
normal school to an insane asylum. But as first
aid to a pioneer town struggling for existence the
choice was debatable, for a penal or charitable in
stitution was from the start sure of inmates and
state support while an educational institution was
not so certain of getting either. Both of the former
institutions would be a steady source of income to
the community while the latter usually required

155

156 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

local subsidies for its establishment. But a college
of any sort had the advantage in that it gave a
certain prestige to a town and attracted a superior
class of settlers. In order so far as possible to
satisfy these local demands the university was
sometimes given to one town, the agricultural col
lege or colleges to another, with perhaps several
experimental stations or farms in various places
and one or more normal schools elsewhere.

Never in the history of the country were colleges
so sought for as in the settlement of the great
Mississippi Valley. The various religious de
nominations, all eager to secure "strategic points,"
were ready to meet the demand. Sometimes it
happened that two or three "universities" were
started simultaneously in the same town. The
tourist may still see from his car window a stately
building standing solitary and deserted and on
inquiry may learn that it was a university built to
boom a certain suburb in the vain hope of pulling
the town in that direction. The rival denomina
tional colleges joined in denouncing the State
} University as an "atheistic institution" where
chapel was not compulsory and the professors
were suspected — not always without reason — of
teaching evolution and practicing vivisection.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 157

But out of this chaos, in which religious zeal,
educational aspirations, local pride, political wire
pulling, and the real estate interests were inextri
cably commingled, have grown the fine institutions
which appeal everywhere to State pride. Secta
rian animosities have died out. Doctrinal ortho
doxy no longer serves to conceal educational in
efficiency. The State Universities, though non-
sectarian, count between seventy and eighty per
cent of church adherents among their students.
As an institution the college is becoming differen
tiated from the university, though there are still
misnomers on both sides of the line. The college
presidents who went about the State "drumming
up " students in order to make a good showing to
conference or synod inspired an ambition for
higher education in the minds of boys and girls
who otherwise would never have thought of such
a thing. This early collegiate competition is
doubtless one reason why now a much larger pro
portion of the population goes to college in the
West than in the East.

The scheme of endowing education by land
grants, never elsewhere carried so far as in America,
was an ingenious one. From a theoretical stand
point it seems perfect, for it meant the absorption

158 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

for public purposes of what Henry George called
"the unearned increment." A newly organized
State was rich in land but in nothing else. The
Government could afford to be generous in dona
tions of land which cost it nothing and which
would rise in value as the country became settled,
automatically keeping pace with the prosperity
of the community. The income from this landed
endowment might be expected to increase at
least as rapidly as the number of children to
be educated.

Actually the scheme did not work out so well as
it promised. The land at first did not cost any
thing — but neither did it at first bring in any
thing. The institutions dependent upon it were in
the position of the heir to a dukedom who might
expect to be master of a magnificent fortune some
fifty years hence but in the meantime had not a
penny. Having turned over to the State Univer
sity the township set aside for it by Congress, the
Legislature was prone to think that it had done
enough and to expect the university to run itself
on such a grant. But a university cannot live on
land alone, especially when it cannot lease it. It
was in truth a royal domain, but professors' sala
ries cannot be paid out of prospective valuations.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 159

So it is no wonder that regents sometimes suc
cumbed to temptation and sold at $1.25 an acre
land that is now worth $125. If the colleges of the
United States had been able to hold on to all the
real estate that they received in the last three
hundred years, they would be the wealthiest of
their kind in the world. The total land grants for
the common schools, which amount to 81,064,300
acres and are equal to the combined area of Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois, are now worth $500,000,000. x
The colonial colleges were aided in their early
days by land grants, but the most extensive ces
sions of this sort were those made by the Federal
Government. When the States claiming land in
the Northwest Territory, between the Ohio River
and the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi,
agreed to surrender their claims to the Govern
ment of the United States, the Land Ordinance of
1785 was passed by the Congress of the Confedera
tion providing for a system of rectangular surveys
in the new domain. In this ordinance was the
provision that "there shall be reserved the lot No.
16 of every township for the maintenance of public
schools within the said township." In this same
year Congress sold 1,500,000 acres of land to the

1 Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. iv, p. 375.

160 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Ohio Company, reserving Section 16 in every
township for schools, Section 29 for religion, and
granting two townships for a university. Ohio
was thus the first State to receive the educational
land grant and the only one to receive the religious
land grant. Of these townships one went to the
founding of the University of Ohio at Athens in
1804 and another to the founding of Miami Uni
versity at Oxford in 1809. Ohio State University
at Columbus came into existence in 1870 when the
Legislature complied with the terms of the Morrill
land grant. Besides these three State institutions
Ohio has thirty-seven other universities and col
leges, mostly established by various denominations.
Of these Oberlin and Antioch are mentioned else
where. Western Reserve, now at Cleveland, was
founded in 1826 at Hudson by the Presbyterians
in part to counteract the Congregational College
of Oberlin which they regarded as too radical.
The chief formative influence of the Ohio public
school system was the association of teachers, the
first of its kind, known as the Western Literary
Institute, organized at Cincinnati in 1829. One
of its founders, Calvin E. Stowe, was commissioned
by the Legislature to study the schools of Europe.
He came back enthusiastic for the Prussian system

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 161

and inspired Horace Mann of Massachusetts and
Henry Barnard of New York with the same ideals.
The Ohio Legislature in 1838 printed ten thousand
copies of his report, and it was largely through their
influence that the educational system of Ohio and
other States was reformed and strengthened.

Not to be outdone by Ohio the first General
Assembly of the Territory of Indiana in 1806
passed an act establishing Vincennes University
signed by Governor William Henry Harrison,
afterwards President of the United States. The
preamble is worth quoting as illustrating not only
the educational ideals of the pioneer community,
but also the style of legislative rhetoric:

Whereas, the independence, happiness, and energy of
every republic depend (under the influence of the des
tinies of Heaven) upon the wisdom, effort, talents, and
energy of its citizens and rulers; and
Whereas science, literature, and the liberal arts
contribute to an emiment degree to improve these
qualities and requirements; and

Whereas learning hath ever been found the ablest ad
vocate of genuine liberty, the best supporter of ra
tional religion, and the source of the only solid and
imperishable glory which nations can acquire. . . .

In order to support "rational religion" a de
partment of theology was authorized in Vincennes

162 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

University, but it was stipulated that "no particu
lar tenets of religion " should be taught. The trus
tees were instructed by the Act of 1806 "to establish
an institution for the education of females" as soon
as their funds should permit.

But Vincennes University did not thrive, and
in 1822 the State Legislature transferred the un
sold land to the seminary that had been estab
lished at Bloomington. The trustees of Vincennes
brought suit for the restoration of the lands, and
thirty years later obtained from the United States
Supreme Court a decision in their favor. But the
long litigation had consumed a large part of the
disputed fund, and by that time the rival institu
tion at Bloomington was firmly established as the
University of Indiana. The Morrill Act in 1862
gave to Indiana land scrip to 390,000 acres which
realized over $300,000. This was devoted to the
establishment of a separate agricultural college,
later named Purdue University in honor of John
Purdue of La Fayette who endowed it with $150,-
000. It is now one of the largest of all State
engineering schools.

That the early legislators of Indiana had a
complete conception of the educational theory
which has been since worked out in the Western

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 163

States is shown from this clause in the constitu
tion of 1816: "It shall be the duty of the Gen
eral Assembly, as soon as circumstances permit,
to provide by law for a general system of education,
ascending in regular gradation from township
schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall
be gratis and equally open to all." All fines for
breaches of the penal laws and "the money which
shall be paid as an equivalent by persons ex
empt from militia duty, except in time of war"
were to be applied to the support of the county
seminaries. But circumstances did not very soon
permit the application of this aspiring programme,
even with the aid of criminals and "slackers,"
and it was more than fifty years before all the
gradations were in place.

Illinois, the third of the States carved out of the
old Indiana Territory, was slower than the other
in developing her institutions of higher education,
but in recent years she has splendidly atoned for
earlier deficiencies. The State received a town
ship in 1818 as a birthday present from the nation
and inherited another township from its parent,
the land district of Kaskaskia. But the Illinois
legislators, for reasons best known to themselves,
kept the funds from the sale of these lands in the

164 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

State treasury for nearly forty years instead of
using them for the support of a college, university,
or "seminary of learning." In 1857 the accumu
lated funds with part of the accrued interest were
turned over to the State Normal University.

The University of Illinois originated in a plan
for an industrial university proposed in a speech
at a farmers' convention at Granville in 1851 by
Professor J. B. Turner, who, if not the father,
was at least the furtherer of the Morrill Act.
The Illinois Industrial University was established
at Urbana by aid of the Morrill land scrip. The
institution subsequently dropped the "Industrial"
but not the industry and is now one of the most
prosperous of the State Universities.

In Wisconsin the federal land grants for higher
education were even worse mismanaged than in
Illinois, yet the State University at Madison,
founded in 1848, has now some eight thousand
students and has become renowned throughout
the world for its active cooperation with the
people and the Government of the State in the
promotion of its agricultural interests and in the
solution of its administrative problems.

To go through the history of each of the States
in turn to show how they utilized the federal land

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 165

grants would be tedious; their early mistakes and
final achievements are much the same, differing
chiefly in degree. But an exception must be
noted in the case of Texas which, entering the
union as an independent republic, retained its
public lands and so was enabled to make more
generous provision for its schools and university
than the Federal Government had done in the
other new States. The University of Texas has
received grants of over two million acres.

According to Huxley, "no system of public edu
cation is worth the name of national unless it creates
a great educational ladder, with one end in the
gutter and the other in the university." Such a
ladder now exists in all of the States outside the
original thirteen. The ascent is practically free
and in most cases open to all on equal terms with
out regard to creed, race, or sex. Yet the aspiring
student is not confined to this ladder, but may
climb others if he prefers. The State does not fear
competition and has permitted and encouraged rival
institutions of all grades to be established. Private
elementary and secondary schools are not so com
mon in the West as in the East, but there are many
independent colleges and universities in all the
Western States. Though founded chiefly by the

166 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

various denominations, these institutions make no
sectarian discrimination among the students and
frequently not even in the faculty, and their
charge for tuition is almost as low as in the State
institutions. Old animosity has died down, and
nowadays the denominational colleges are usually
on friendly terms with the State. The State Uni
versity is usually willing to concede that many of
these colleges can give as good an undergraduate
education as it can, and the denominational college
on its part is usually willing to concede that it cannot
compete with the State institutions in the facilities
for technical, professional, and graduate training.
So in one way or another all of the Western and
Southern States, and some of the Northeastern,
have established their own universities as well as
normal schools and agricultural colleges, some
times combined and sometimes in different places.
These institutions differ widely in size and stand
ing. Some are small and weak, doing work of a
low order and being periodically upset by political
disturbances ; others rival the largest endowed uni
versities in income, numbers, and the work of
their graduate and professional schools. They are
much alike, however, in their general character
istics. As a rule, the State Universities charge no

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 167

tuition except perhaps a moderate fee in the pro
fessional schools and for students from outside the
State. They usually provide professional courses
in law, medicine, engineering, and the like, but
none in theology. The residence halls or dormi
tories which form a prominent feature of the en
dowed colleges are not so common and sometimes
altogether absent in the State Universities. These
institutions are responsive to the needs of the
people and quick to provide new forms of voca
tional training. They extend their influence
widely beyond their walls and often carry on
scientific, legislative, and financial investigations
for the State Government. They form the crown
of the public school system and admit to some de
partments graduates from any reputable high
school, giving equal opportunities to rich and
poor, to men and women. The American State
University may justly be regarded as constituting
a distinct type not to be found anywhere else in
the world.

CHAPTER XII

THE RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY

Where the State has bestowed education the man who accepts
it must be content to accept it merely as a charity unless he re
turns it to the State in full, in the shape of good citizenship. . . .
Only a limited number of us can ever become scholars . . . but
we can all be good citizens. We can all lead a life of action, a life
of endeavor, a life that is to be judged primarily by the effort,
somewhat by the result, along the lines of helping the growth of
what is right and decent and generous and lofty in our several
communities, in the State, in the Nation. — Theodore Roosevelt.

THE idea of a State University is older than the
States themselves, though the institution was slow
in developing and in differentiating itself as a dis
tinct type. At first most of the colonial universi
ties received public funds and were under govern
mental control. The first constitutions of Penn
sylvania, North Carolina, and Vermont, in the
days of the Revolution, provided for universities.
The University of Georgia was organized in 1785
and the University of Tennessee in 1794. Any of
these early beginnings might have developed into
the typical State University; but the honor of being

168

RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY 169

called "the mother of the State Universities" was
reserved for Michigan.

The germ of the State University came from
France, but it grew up under German influences.
The revolution that severed the political bonds
connecting America with the mother country also
broke the thread of educational traditions, and
American educators turned from their English
enemies to their French friends. French began to
be taught in the colleges. John Adams, coming
back from Paris full of enthusiasm for French edu
cational ideals, embodied them in the Massachu
setts Constitution of 1780 and founded the Ameri
can Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chevalier
Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who came over in 1778
to fight for American independence, remained to
lay the corner-stone of an Academic des Sciences et
Beaux Arts des Etats-Unis d'Amerique at Rich
mond in 1786 under the patronage of Jefferson
and many other distinguished men of Virginia,
Pennsylvania, New York, and France. Quesnay 's
academy comprised a graduate school, a museum,
a press, and commissions to cooperate with the
Government in the investigation of the flora
and fauna of the country and in the development
of its mineral resources. Nothing came of this

170 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

scheme, although the desired objects are now be
ing attained in a similar way through the State
Universities and the national bureaus of mining,
geology, fisheries, agriculture, and ethnology.

In France the constructive genius of the Ency
clopedists was supplemented and actualized by
the practical genius of Napoleon. The University
of France as established in 1808 included all the
colleges and schools of the country above the
elementary. This, as we have seen, was the idea
which Jefferson had in mind for the University of
Virginia but was not able to carry out in its en
tirety. It was the idea Jefferson was seeking to
realize when he invited Dupont de Nemours to
visit him at Philadelphia and Monticello and to
draw up a plan of public education.1 The idea
was brought to New York by John Jay and was
carried out by Alexander Hamilton in the "Uni
versity of the State of New York," which corre
sponds most nearly to the French cbnception of a
university, as it is not a teaching body but rather
the central educational office of the State.

1 Dupont's plan Sur I' Education Nationale dans les Etats-Unis,
published in 1800, provides for a University of North America
to embrace primary and secondary schools, colleges, and profes
sional schools of medicine, mining, social science, law, and higher
mathematics.

RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY 171

But of all the seeds from the French tree wafted
across the Atlantic that which fell in the forests of
Michigan brought forth most abundantly. There
were only five or six thousand people, French and
English, scattered over this vast territory when in
1817 the Acting Governor and two Supreme Court
Judges authorized the establishment of a system
of education modeled after Napoleon's University
of France. Judge Woodward drew up the plan
for it and invented the nomenclature. It was to be
called "The Catholepistemiad or University of
Michigania." There were to be thirteen didaxia
or professorships, to wit: the didaxia of Catholepis-
temia (universal science), of Anthropoglossica
(languages and literatures), of Mathematica, of
Physiognostica (natural history), of Physiosophica
(physics), of Astronomia, of Chymia, of latrica
(medicine), of (Economica (economics), of Ethica,
of Polemitactica (military tactics), of Diegetica
(history), and of Ennceica (philosophy and reli
gion) . This institution, according to the custom of
the time, was to be supported by lotteries as well
as by public taxation. Instruction was to be free
to those not having adequate means . The ' ' Catho
lepistemiad" or university was to maintain branch
schools or academies in various parts of the territory

172 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and some of these were actually established. The
delicate question of the relations of the rival
races and religions was neatly adjusted by giving
seven of the chairs to the Reverend John Mon-
teith, a Scotch Presbyterian minister of Detroit,
and the other six to Father Gabriel Richard, a
French Catholic priest.

The act of 1821 relieved the institution of its
fantastic nomenclature and rigid constitution and
it seemed likely to lapse into a college of the con
ventional type. But in the thirties a wave of Ger
man influence swept over America and started
what is known as "the educational renaissance."
The French influence had prevailed for about half
a century but accomplished very little except to
start the Universities of Virginia, New York, and
Michigan. The German influence lasted a century
and was much more powerful; in the East it trans
formed the colleges into universities and in the
West it shaped the State Universities and the
school system connected with them. The stream
of American graduates to German universities
which continued without cessation up to the Great
War may be said to have started in 1815 when
George Ticknor went to Gottingen. Ticknor was
a Dartmouth man living in Boston when the read-

RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY 173

ing of Madame de StaeTs work on Germany opened
his eyes to the opportunities afforded by the uni
versities of that country, and he determined to go
there. But how could he learn the language?
There were few German books to be had in Massa
chusetts, and he could not even find a native Ger
man competent to instruct him. He heard that
there was a German dictionary in New Hampshire
and sent for it. With such equipment he went to
Gottingen. He was followed by Edward Everett,
who found the facilities there far superior to those
of Oxford and Cambridge and wrote back to Har
vard to send on a scholar. In response to this sug
gestion the university sent George Bancroft. Dr.
J. G. Cogswell, who went to Gottingen in 1815,
also visited the school of Pestalozzi at Yverdun
and the school of Fellenberg at Hofwyl, and when
he came home he started a school on their prin
ciples at Round Hill near Northampton, Mas
sachusetts. Bancroft, finding that his alma mater,
Harvard, would not allow him to lecture on his
tory although he had that privilege at Gottingen
and Berlin, joined Cogswell in launching the
Round Hill School, which ran for sixteen years.
Ticknor on his return took a chair at Harvard and
tried to introduce the German elective system, but

174 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the time was not yet ripe and nobody listened to
him. As a result of his persistency some slight
freedom in the choice of studies was allowed to the
students, but many years passed before Harvard
was made completely elective. Jefferson, on the
other hand, was much taken with Ticknor's ideas
and tried to get him to come to the University of
Virginia, where the elective system was established
at the start.

Up to 1850 about a hundred Americans had
studied at German universities,1 among them
Henry W. Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley, and
Theodore Dwight Woolsey, President of Yale.
After that date there was a rapid increase in the
numbers of American students at German universi
ties, where they were more hospitably received
than in the British universities and were provided
with better opportunities for graduate study and
research. The influence of German literature and
philosophy upon New England thought was strong,
but the New England colleges were too set in their
ways to be radically reshaped. In the West the
State Universities were young when the German

1 The complete list is published in B. A. Hinsdale's "Notes on
the History of Foreign Influences upon Education in the United
States" in the Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1898.
See also Thwing's History of Higher Education in America, p. 320.

RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY 175

influence began to prevail, and they were largely
molded by it. The chief instrumentality was the
report on the Prussian school system made by
Victor Cousin to the French Minister of Public
Instruction in 1837. This report Sir William
Hamilton took as the basis of his plea for university
reform in Great Britain, but he failed to accom
plish his purpose. At a later day the efforts of
Matthew Arnold to introduce German ideas into
English schools likewise proved ineffectual. But
in America, through the medium of Horace Mann,
President Tappan of Michigan, President Way-
land of Brown, W. T. Harris, the Commissioner of
Education, President White of Cornell, and others,
the German system helped to effect a radical trans
formation of the schools and colleges in the greater
part of the United States.

Let us return, for a concrete illustration, to the
University of Michigan. The Act of 1837 com
pletely reorganized the public school system on the
Prussian plan, coordinated elementary, secondary,
and university education, and brought it under
governmental control. It stipulated that the fee
for admission to the University should never
exceed ten dollars and that no tuition should be
charged to Michigan students. High schools and

176 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

minor colleges, corresponding to the German
gymnasia, were to be established as branches of the
University in various parts of the State, and there
were to be institutions for the education of women,
for the training of teachers, and for instruction in
agriculture. Under th:s system a normal school
on the Prussian plan was opened at Ypsilanti in
1850, following in this field Massachusetts (1839)
and New York (1844). The agricultural college
founded at Lansing in 1857 was the first of its kind
in this country. Today every State has one or
more of these institutions.

But in one respect the University of Michigan,
like the University of Virginia, followed the Ger-
man model too closely: it had no president. The
rectoral plan, though apparently the more demo
cratic, does not seem to work in America, and it
was not until 1851, when the University of Mich
igan got a president — and a somewhat autocratic
one — that the institution became securely pros
perous. Henry P. Tappan left the chair of philoso
phy in the College of the City of New York to
accept the call to Michigan because he wanted a
chance to work out the ideas he had acquired in
Germany. The first catalogue issued under his
administration contains the announcement of bold

RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY 177

departures in the direction of freedom of choice
and graduate study:

An institution cannot deserve the name of a university
which does not aim in all the material of learning, in
the professorships it establishes, and in the whole scope
of its provisions, to make it possible for every student
to study what he pleases and to any extent he pleases.
Nor can it be regarded as consistent with the spirit
of a free country to deny to its citizens the possibilities
of the highest knowledge.

To appreciate the daring of this step it must be
remembered that at that time Harvard had only
three graduate students and that the first graduate
school in America had been started at Yale in 1847,
only five years before. Forty-one years after
President Tappan had declared that the people
had a right to free graduate instruction at public
expense we find President Eliot of Harvard argu
ing against State support of higher education of
any sort.1 That this is the prevailing opinion in
the East today is shown by the fact that the State
Universities are mostly confined to the West.

President Tappan's proposed reforms were too
ambitious for complete accomplishment; but he

1 In the famous debate before the National Educational Asso
ciation in 1893 when John W. Hoyt urged a national university.

178 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

introduced lectures and research work and ex
tended the elective system which had been started
at Michigan in 1837. The State Legislature in
1851 passed an act requiring the regents of the
University to provide instruction for those who
did not want to take the ancient languages. This
was carried out by establishing a modern course
leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science, which
had been granted for the first time at the Law
rence Scientific School of Harvard the year before.
The German seminar method of teaching history
was later adopted at Michigan University by
Charles Kendall Adams and Andrew D. White,
both afterwards presidents of Cornell University.
The plan for the coordination of the high schools
and university, though foreshadowed in the scheme
of 1817, was not worked out until 1870. In their
present form the high schools are independent of
the universities as far as administration is con
cerned and are not supported by them; but the
high schools are inspected by university officers
and the diplomas of accredited schools are ac
cepted in lieu of entrance examinations. The final
examinations of the accredited high schools thus
correspond to the Abiturientenexamen of Germany
and the passage to the university is made as easy

RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY 179

and natural as the passage from the seventh to the
eighth grade. The diploma system has been
adopted by all the State Universities and has ex
tended to all the endowed colleges except a few
in the East.

The admission of women remains as one other
step to be considered in the evolution of the State
University system. This innovation, like other
educational reforms, was instigated by the people
rather than by the authorities. As early as 1858
the Michigan Legislature had declared that the
high objects for which the university was organized
could never be fully attained until women were
admitted, but it was not until 1870 that the regents
decided that no person of requisite literary and
moral qualifications should be excluded from the
State University. By that time the Universities of
Iowa, Kansas, Indiana, and Minnesota were co
educational; those of Illinois, California, and
Missouri adopted the system in the same year as
Michigan. All the State Universities except those
of Georgia, Florida, and Virginia are now co
educational. Ezra Cornell, in accordance with his
Quaker principles, was anxious to give equal privi
leges to women in the university that he founded
in 1865, but for a time he was overruled, and it

180 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

was not until 1872 that coeducation was intro
duced there by President White, formerly of the
University of Michigan.

The State Universities and other institutions
have imitated one another until now they are in
most respects very much alike. Nor can any
sharp distinction be drawn between them on the
grounds that one class is supported by the State
and the other by endowments and tuition. Cor
nell University, for instance, receives the Federal
and State funds for agriculture and mechanic arts
and is a State University in type though on a pri
vate foundation. The University of Michigan,
which is here used as a type of the State Univer
sity, did not receive a penny from the State until
1867, fifty years after its foundation. On the
other hand, the appropriations of the General
Court of Massachusetts to Harvard College from
its founding in 1636 to 1786 reached a total of
$115,797, an amount equal to half a million dollars
at the present time.

CHAPTER

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA

The greatest religious fact in the United States today is the
Catholic School System, maintained without any aid except from
the people who love it. — Archbishop Spalding.

A SEPARATE chapter in this survey of American
education must be devoted to the training carried
on by the Roman Catholic Church, for its history
has been distinct and its course of development in
one respect the opposite from that of the rest of the
country. Most American colleges were started
under the auspices of some particular religious de
nomination. Those that were Protestant, how
ever, have in the majority of cases become free
from church control and usually retain little to
distinguish them from those of other sects or from
government institutions. The elementary and
secondary education of Protestant children is now
almost wholly carried on by public schools or by
private institutions having no sectarian affiliations.
But while this change has taken place the Roman

181

182 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Catholics have been developing in the last fifty
years an independent school system of their own,
entirely under ecclesiastical control and covering
all grades from the kindergarten to the university
and professional schools.

The Catholic population of the United States,
scanty at first, has been largely increased by
annexation and by immigration. When Father
Jogues, the illustrious French Jesuit of Canada,
visited Manhattan Island in 1644, he found only
two Catholics — an Irishman and a Portuguese
woman. In 1789, when the hierarchy was con
stituted in the United States by the consecration of
the Right Reverend John Carroll as Bishop of the
See of Baltimore, there were about 15,800 Catho
lics in Maryland, 7,000 in Pennsylvania, and a few
thousand scattered among the other Sta/tes. But
the territories subsequently annexed — Florida,
Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Califor
nia, Porto Rico, and the Philippines — were Cath
olic in so far as they had been settled or christian
ized at all. Of the immigrants who poured into
the country in a swelling stream up to the out
break of the Great War the Irish, Germans, Poles,
Italians, Czechs, Croats, and Lithuanians were
largely Catholic. In 1919, according' to the

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 183

Official Catholic Directory, the Catholic popu
lation of the United States numbered 17,549,324.

Catholic education in America antedates Protes
tant. Before schools were opened in New Eng
land, the Franciscans had missions in Florida and
New Mexico. The Florida church dates back to
1565, almost to the time of the Council of Trent.
By 1634 there were 35 Franciscan priests conduct
ing 44 missions, with 30,000 Indian converts, some
of whom were taught reading and writing. There is
some record of a classical school for Spanish children
at St. Augustine as early as 1606. But the Apa-
lachees went on the warpath in 1703 and wiped out
the missions. In 1736 Bishop Tejada reopened
the seminary at St. Augustine, but again there
came Indian wars, and at the time when Florida
was annexed by the United States there was little
left of the Catholic colony.

The Indians of New Mexico were of a more
tractable type than those in Florida. They were
already settled in pueblos when the white man
entered and had developed simple forms of agri
culture and domestic arts. With the expedition of
Don Juan de Onate in 1598 into what is now the
State of New Mexico went several Franciscan
friars. Others followed, settling in the pueblos

184 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and teaching the natives to sing and to pray and to
work. Under such direction they developed not a
little skill at brickmaking and carpentry, and built
their own churches with curiously carved roofs and
painted walls. By 1630 missions had been estab
lished in 90 pueblos comprising a population of
60,000. There were fifty Franciscans in New
Mexico, and many of their convents had schools
attached where the sacristan of the church served
as schoolmaster. But in 1680 the Indians re
volted, determined to root out the Spanish civili
zation. They massacred the friars and demolished
the churches and schools. Ten years later there
was not a Spaniard left within the limits of
New Mexico*

In the north the Catholic missionaries were no
less courageous and enterprising. As early as 1635
the Jesuits at Quebec had founded a college which
the great Bishop Laval a few years later declared
to be almost the equal of similar institutions
in France. Soon other schools followed, among
which the Ursuline convent was particularly note
worthy for devotion and efficiency. Laval sought
to civilize the Indians by educating their children
with those of the French. With this end in view
he founded the Quebec Seminary in 1663. Besides

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 185

the Jesuit priests and the Ursuline nuns, there were
the Sulpicians and the Recollets to care for the
spiritual welfare and education of the northern
colonists. It is interesting to note that at the time
when Harvard was being established by Protes
tants in New England, the foundations of Laval
University were being laid by Catholics at Quebec.
Out of these two institutions, so founded and so
courageously nurtured, there grew up in time two
radically different systems of education, both of
far-reaching influence in the later development of
the two countries.

In California the Franciscans were more suc
cessful than in Florida because they adopted the
Jesuit system of segregation. So long as the In
dian converts remained in contact with the hea
then population of their native villages they could
not be kept constant to the requirements of the
new life, for the power of the medicine man
counteracted the persuasion of the priest. The
Jesuits of Paraguay, in order to overcome the evil
influence of the environment, formed separate
industrial colonies where they could train the
Indians under their exclusive guidance and control.

In Lower California the Jesuits had started
mission work as early as 1697, but in 1767, when

186 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Charles III ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits
from all the Spanish dominions, they were re
placed by Franciscan friars. The Franciscans in
their turn relinquished the peninsula to the Do
minicans and entered upon the new field of Upper
California, where Father Junipero Serra estab
lished a mission at San Diego in 1769. The mis
sions so multiplied and prospered that at the time
of their suppression in 1834 there was a chain of
them stretching north for 700 miles and sheltering
more than 30,000 converts. Under direction of
the padres the Indians constructed the mission
buildings and furniture now so much admired and
imitated. In these Catholic colonies the Indian
children and converts were taught to recite in their
own tongues the prayers, creeds, and command
ments, and — what was much more difficult —
they were taught to work. Whatever their incli
nations may have been, the Indians worked to such
good effect that ere long these little communities
grew wealthy. The annual output of cattle and
crops at the time the missions were seized by the
State was worth more than $2,000,000.

At first the friars, being more anxious to make
Christians than Spaniards out of the Indians,
confined their instruction to the native languages

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 187

and paid little attention to orders issued by Gov
ernor Borica in 1795 that they teach Spanish
exclusively in the missions. Borica therefore de
termined to start a public school system independ
ent of the clergy. He opened the first of these
schools in the public granary at San Jose with a
retired sergeant as schoolmaster.1 It was not
easy, however, to find teachers, for at that time the
Spanish population of California numbered less
than a thousand souls, and few of the soldiers could
read or write.

When Mexico threw off the Spanish yoke, the
missions in California as well as in Mexico were
declared secularized. San Miguel, the last of the
California missions, was sold out by the last of the
governors on July 4, 1846, only three days before
the American flag was raised over Monterey.
"The flag of the United States appeared ten years
too late to save the mission property from the
rapacity of unscrupulous greed and the Indians
from dispersion. What remained was restored to
the Church by order of the United States Courts."2

The missions in the Californias had been started

1 Bancroft's History of California, vol. i, p. 643.

2 Catholic Educational Work in Early California, by the Reverend
Zephyrin Engelhardt, O. F. M., in Proceedings of the Catholic
Educational Association (1918).

I

188 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and continuously aided by a financial foundation
known as the Pious Fund, for which the Jesuits
had collected the first contributions in 1697.
When Mexico became independent, however, its
Government appropriated the Pious Fund, which
then amounted to about two million dollars, and
promised to pay interest at six per cent. But after
Upper California was taken over by the United
States, Mexico refused to pay anything on that
part of the fund which belonged by right to the
Church in Upper California. For fifty years the
United States pressed this claim against Mexico
and finally referred it to the Permanent Court of Ar
bitration at The Hague, which in 1902 decided in
favor of the United States. Mexico was ordered by
the court to pay annually $43,050.99 and interest
in arrears to the amount of $1,420,682.67.

In New Orleans under French rule elementary
education was begun by Father Cecil, a Capuchin,
who opened a parish school for boys in 1722, and
five years later ten Ursuline Sisters started a con
vent school for girls. The transfer of the Louisi
ana Territory to the United States in 1804 excited
alarm in the minds of the Sisters, especially since
Jefferson was supposed to share the political and
religious views of the French revolutionists. But

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 189

when the Mother Superior wrote to President Jef
ferson to ask protection, she received the following
reassuring reply: "Whatever diversity of shade
may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow
citizens, the charitable objects of your Institution
cannot be indifferent to any; and its furtherance of
the wholesome purposes of society by training up
its younger members in the way they should go.
can not fail to insure it the patronage of the
Government it is under. Be assured it will meet
with all the protection my office can give it."

These schools established in the Spanish and
French possessions for the Indians or for the
children of the colonists were, however, quite apart
from the main stream of Catholic education. This
had its real origin in Maryland. With the first
colonists sent out by Lord Baltimore in 1634 came
Father Andrew White, a learned Jesuit who set
himself to study the Indian language and prepared
a grammar and catechism. But after the Clai-
borne-Ingle rebellion ten years later the Jesuits
were deported in chains.

A school which had been started in 1640 among
the Catholics of Newtown, Maryland, was in 1653
endowed by the will of Edward Cotton, a rich
planter, with all his "female Cattle and their

190 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Increase for Ever" and with "one thousand
pounds Weight of good sound Merchantable leaf
Tobacco and Cask." This school was, in 1677,
developed into a Jesuit "school for humanities"
in order "to bring those regions, which foreigners
have unjustly called ferocious, to a higher state of
virtue and civilization." The Jesuits also opened
a school in New York City in 1684 near the corner
of Broadway and Wall Street, or the site of Trinity
Church. A few years later these schools at New
York and Newtown were suppressed. This period
of persecution lasted a century until the overthrow
of British rule. In 1704 a law was passed in Mary
land providing that if any persons professing to be
of the Church of Rome should keep school, or take
upon themselves the education, government, or
boarding of youth, at any place in the province,
upon conviction, such offenders should be trans
ported to England to undergo the penalties pro
vided there by Statutes 11 and 12, William III,
"for the further preventing the growth of Popery."
Rich Catholics nevertheless tried to maintain
the faith in their families by the sub rosa employ
ment of Jesuit tutors — although this subjected
them to a fine of 40 shillings a day — and by send
ing their sons abroad under aliases to the Belgian

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 191

College of St. Omer, although this made them
liable to a penalty of 500 pounds. Even the im
portation of an "Irish Papist servant" involved
a duty of 40 shillings which went to the support of
schools exclusively under the control of the Church
of England.

In 1706 the Jesuits founded a preparatory school
at Bohemia Manor, in the most remote corner of
Maryland, close to the Pennsylvania line. This
institution developed into a classical college, but it
was closed in 1765 and today its very site is in
question. Yet among the pupils enrolled in this
wilderness school were "Jacky" Carroll, after
wards Archbishop of Baltimore, and his cousin,
Charles Carroll of Carrollton, whom every school
boy knows as the best penman among the signers
of the Declaration of Independence.

The Revolution inaugurated a new era of reli
gious freedom. John Carroll, who had become
prefect of the Jesuit College of Bruges, returned
to the United States and became in 1789 the first
bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in America.
In 1791 he founded Georgetown College, which
became the leading Jesuit university of the United
States. The second Catholic college in America
was Mount St. Mary's at Emmitsburg, Maryland,

192 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

which was founded by the Sulpicians in 1808.
America has been the gainer by every outburst of
intolerance in Europe and has often found its most
valuable men among those who were thought unfit
to live in their native land. The outcast dissenters
of England founded New England. The Hugue
nots from France have given to America many of
her foremost men of science. So likewise, when
the Catholic churches and schools were suppressed
by the French Revolution, the expelled clergy gave
a great impetus to Catholic education in the
United States.

The Society of St. Sulpice, which had been
founded in Paris in 1642 for the education of
ecclesiastics, was among the victims of the French
Revolution. Four of the Sulpicians came to Balti
more in 1791. One of them, Father Flaget, later
became the first bishop in Kentucky. Another,
Father Richard, went to Detroit, where he set up
the first press there, printed the first newspaper,
and took part in the founding of the University
of Michigan, the " Catholepistemiad " already
described. A third, the Reverend William Du-
bourg, became president of Georgetown Academy,
founded St. Mary's Seminary at Baltimore, and,
when he became Bishop of Louisiana in 1815»

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 193

brought over six religious orders for pioneer
educational work west of the Mississippi.

St. Mary's, Baltimore, was at first a failure.
In 1791 it started with five students but in a few
years the attendance fell to none. When Napo
leon restored the Church, Father Emery, Supe
rior General of the Sulpicians, determined to call all
the fathers back to France. But Bishop Carroll
begged him to allow them to remain. The ques
tion was therefore referred to Pope Pius VII. The
Pope in his wisdom said to Father Emery: "My
son, let that seminary remain. It will bear fruit
in its own time." The Pope's faith was eventu
ally fulfilled, for St. Mary's became the largest
and most influential of Catholic seminaries and by
1910 had supplied over 1800 priests and 30 bishops
to the Church in America. The founder of St.
Mary's, Father Dubourg, while on a visit to New
York met Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a widow who
had been converted to Catholicism and was zealous
for service in her new faith. Father Dubourg
induced her to come to Maryland to start a school
for girls. Joined by other pious women, she
formed in 1809 an organization of Sisters of Char
ity on a farm near Emmitsburg. Later on it was

decided to affiliate with the French Sisters of
13

194 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. The order grew
rapidly and by 1850 had established fifty-eight
schools in various States.

The Sisters of the Visitation, another widespread
teaching order of women, started in America at
about the same time and place. A young Irish
lady, Miss Alice Lalor, came with two widows to
Georgetown in 1799 at the invitation of Father
Neale, President of Georgetown College, to open a
school for girls which subsequently developed into
a convent and academy of the Visitation Order of
St. Francis de Sales.

Next to Maryland, Pennsylvania had the largest
Catholic population in colonial days, for the Quak
ers were more tolerant than the Episcopalians or
the Puritans. While the Catholics met with per
secution in Maryland, they found full religious
freedom and even sympathy on the Pennsylvania
side of the line. Protestants aided in building
Father Schneider's first church at Goshenhoppen
and sent their children to the school that he opened
in 1741 in a two-story frame house. It was indeed
an opportunity not to be neglected, for there was
no other school in the settlement and it is not every
child who can learn his A B C's from a former
Rector Magnificus of Heidelberg University, as

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 195

was the Reverend Theodore Schneider. In Phila
delphia in 1781 St, Mary's parish bought an old
Quaker schoolhouse and opened therein the mother
school of all the Catholic parochial schools in the
English-speaking States.

One of the four French Sulpicians who came to
Baltimore in 1791 was Stephen Theodore Badin,
the first priest to be ordained within the thirteen
original States. He was sent immediately after
ward to the "dark and bloody ground" of Ken
tucky, although he was only twenty-five years old
and knew but a few words of English. Here he
labored alone for fourteen years, an austere and
indefatigable priest, living largely in the saddle as
he visited the widely scattered families. He was
joined in 1806 by the saintly Father Nerinckx who
had been educated at the Belgian universities of
Louvain and Malines and had been driven out
by the Revolution. Father Nerinckx was a true
mystic from the Land of Mystics but withal practi
cal, and he found in the Kentucky wilderness a
fertile field. He was strong enough to roll logs for
his own churches and to master a bully single-
handed. He and Father Badin built at Bardstown
the log cabin, sixteen feet square, which served in
1811 as the episcopal palace for the reception of

196 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Bishop Flaget, whose see embraced the whole
northwestern territory of the United States al
though it contained only a thousand Catholic
families. In 1812 Father Nerinckx got together a
group of women willing to devote their lives to the
Christian training of girls and he organized them at
Little Loretto as "The Society of the Friends of
Mary Sorrowing at the Foot of the Cross of Our
Lord Jesus Christ." The order is commonly
known as the "Sisters of Loretto," from the Santa
Casa or Holy House in Nazareth where the Virgin
Mary was born and which, according to tradition,
had been carried away by angels in 1291 and placed
first in Dalmatia and later at Loretto, Italy. Miss
Anne Rhodes, the first superioress of the com
munity, provided the funds for its establishment
by the donation of a slave who was sold by Father
Nerinckx for $450. The Lorettines, inspired by
the zeal of their founder, increased their numbers
and colonized until within a dozen years they had
six schools containing 250 girls.

Two other teaching communities of women origi
nated in Kentucky at this time. Father David, a
Sulpician who came with Bishop Flaget, organized
the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth near Bards-
town. The Dominican Father Wilson organized

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 197

the Sisters of St. Dominic at St. Rose. These three
communities spread rapidly through Kentucky,
Missouri, and Arkansas. As the country became
more settled, they established convent schools for
girls in other Western States.

In New York up to 1822 the Catholic schools of
the parishes of St. Peter's and St. Patrick's re
ceived, like the schools of other denominations, a
part of the public school funds. After that the
Public School Society took charge of the distribu
tion of the funds and stopped the appropriation to
sectarian schools. In 1840 Bishop Hughes of New
York made a hard fight for a share in the public
funds, but he was beaten. He then declared that
"the days have come and the place in which the
school is more necessary than the church" and set
out to establish an independent school system
under church control. In this he was so successful
that, before his death, nearly every church in New
York had been provided with a parish school.

These were the days of the "no Popery" agi
tation when "Native Americans" and Irish fought
in the streets of New York and Philadelphia over
the relative merits of the Douay and King James's
versions of the Bible, although many of the bel
ligerents doubtless could not have told the two

198 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

books apart. The Catholics objected to the cus
tom of holding devotional exercises in the Protes
tant form at the opening of school sessions. The
Protestants, on the other hand, were alarmed at
the rapid influx of large numbers of Irish and Ger
man Catholics and feared the overthrow of the
free public school system which was their country's
pride. The outcome of the conflict was a clean-cut
separation of public and sectarian schools. Bible-
reading, hymns, and prayers have been almost
altogether eliminated from the public schools.
This exclusion, however, does not make the schools
acceptable to the Catholics and Lutherans who
believe that religious training cannot safely be di
vorced from secular education. Wherever possible,
therefore, they have established their own schools.
The First Provincial Council of Baltimore de
clared in 1829 : "We deem it entirely necessary that
schools should be established, in which the young,
while they be taught letters, should also be taught
the principles of faith and morals." But this and
subsequent recommendations had no very marked
effect, and Catholic schools were not common until
after 1884, when the Third Plenary Council of
Baltimore ordered a parochial school to be erected
near each church within two years and threatened

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 199

with removal any priest who neglected this com
mand. The Council further decreed that "all
Catholic parents are bound to send their children
to the parochial schools, unless either at home or in
other Catholic schools they may sufficiently and
evidently provide for the Christian education of
their children or unless it be lawful to send them to
other schools on account of a sufficient cause ap
proved by the bishop and with opportune cautions
and remedies."

The Pastoral Letter of the Third Plenary Coun
cil declared that "the public school system is
controlled absolutely by Protestants, conducted
on Protestant principles and made an instrument
for debauching the faith of Catholic children
who enter the walls of state institutions." Many
Catholics of that period went so far as to deny the
right of the State to any share in education. They
asserted, for instance, that "education is none of
the state's business," and referred to "this infidel,
dishonest, oppressive and un-American system of
state education." ' They declared that "education
itself is the business of the spiritual society alone,
not of secular society. The instruction of children
and youth is included in the Sacrament of Orders

1 American Catholic Quarterly, April, 1884, p. 245.

200 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and the State usurps the functions of the spiritual
society when it turns educator."1

But this extreme view received a heavy blow
in 1891 from the Reverend Thomas Bouquillon,
Professor of Moral Theology in the Catholic Uni
versity at Washington, in a pamphlet entitled
Education: To Whom Does It Belong? In this he
established by abundant citations from the church
authorities themselves that "education belongs to
individuals isolated and collected, to the family,
to the state, to the church: to these four together,
to none of them exclusively. Such is the theoreti
cal doctrine. The practical application of it de
mands the combination, more or less harmonious,
of these four interested parties in the work of the
schools."

Though Dr. Bouquillon's contention that the
State had some rights in education raised a storm
of opposition from more rigorous Catholics, his
view gradually gained ground. In consequence
the earlier attitude of intolerance and hostility
toward the public school has become much amelio
rated. In spite of the rapid growth of the parish
school system, about half of the Catholic children
now attend the public schools, and sometimes more

The Tablet; quoted in Putnam's Magazine, December, 1869.

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 201

than half of the teachers in the public schools are
Catholic women. In one of our great cities the
percentage of Catholic teachers has risen as high
as 85 per cent. x

Two notable attempts — known as the "Pough-
keepsie Plan" and the "Faribault Plan" — have
been made to throw part of the burden of the sup
port of the Catholic schools upon the State. At
Poughkeepsie, New York, the city school board in
1873 took over two Catholic schools for a nominal
rental and employed the same nuns as teachers.
The arrangement lasted till 1899, when it was
decided to be unconstitutional. In 1891 a similar
plan, devised by Archbishop Ireland, was put into
effect at Faribault and Stillwater, Minnesota. The
parish school buildings were leased for a year to the
state authorities. The same teachers, belonging to
the order of St. Dominic, were retained and received
$50 a month from the public school board in place
of their former small compensation. After hear
ing mass in the parish church, the children were
marched into the classrooms. After school closed
in the afternoon they were instructed in the cate
chism for one hour. No text-books to which the
Archbishop objected were to be used.

1 Proceedings, Catholic Educational Association (1917), p. 234.

202 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

But the Faribault attempt at compromise was
attacked from both the Protestant and Catholic
sides as virtual surrender to the opposition. The
German Catholic press was virulent in its criticism
of Archbishop Ireland, I and his opponents carried
the question up to Rome. The decision, Tolerari
potest, of the Pope and Propaganda, delivered on
April 21, 1892, declared that, "while the decrees of
the Baltimore Councils on parochial schools are
maintained in full vigor, the arrangement entered
into by the Most Reverend John Ireland as to the
schools of Faribault and Stillwater, all things con
sidered, can be tolerated." This decision gave
little satisfaction to either party and did not en
courage the continuation of such efforts to combine
the parochial and public school systems.

After the two organizations agreed to keep apart
they got on better together. The habit of the
sisterhoods is now commonly seen on the campus
of State Universities or institutions of Protestant
foundation, and the convent schools contain many
girls from Protestant or Hebrew families. The Cath
olic high schools voluntarily submit to inspection

1 For instance the Buffalo Christliche Welt of October 9, 1891,
said: "If the Devil and his grandmother can enjoy themselves at
all they must have danced a real Irish jig when the parochial
school at Faribault was given over to the State."

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 203

from the State University authorities in order
to qualify as accredited schools which have the
privilege of sending their graduates to the State
Universities without examination at entrance.
About half of the graduates of Catholic high
schools who enter college go to non-Catholic insti
tutions. About two-thirds of the Catholic girls
who seek secondary education are in non-Catholic
institutions.1 The official Catholic Directory for
1919 reports 5788 parish schools with 1,633,599
children attending. There are 215 Catholic col
leges for boys and 674 academies for girls. But in
considering these figures it is necessary to note
that "many of these so-called colleges have never
had a single college student" and only 84 have
any students above the high school grade.2 The
rivalry between the different dioceses and teaching
orders has had the same effect as the rivalry be
tween the different towns and Protestant sects in
leading to an excessive multiplication of weak and
inadequate colleges.

The efforts of Catholic educators are now be
ing directed toward raising the standard of their

1 Burns, Catholic Education, 1917.

2 Reverend W. J. Bergin in Proceedings of the Catholic Educa
tional Association, 1917. p. 62.

204 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

institutions to make them true to their name and
better able to meet the demands of modern life.
In this movement the Catholic University of
America at Washington has taken a leading part.
This institution was established in 1887 by Pope
Leo XIII in the Apostolic Letter Magni nobis
gaudii and includes a School of Science with en
gineering courses, as well as Schools of Sacred,
Philosophical, and Social Sciences. Located near
it and affiliated with it are houses of the Paulist
Fathers, Marists, Franciscans, Sulpicians, Domin
icans, and other orders. The University conducts
a summer school for Catholic women teachers
and corrects the examination papers of the 160
Catholic high schools accepting its standard
curriculum.

In establishing and supporting its independent
educational system from the primary school to the
graduate university, the Catholic Church has had
the advantage of being able to command the serv
ices of some forty thousand men and women of
religious orders who devote themselves to teaching
on less than half the salary of public school teachers.
Nine-tenths of the teachers in the Catholic schools
and colleges belong to religious orders or institutes.
The Jesuits have the most colleges, the Benedictines

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA 205

next, and the Christian Brothers third. The last
named, the Institute of Brothers of the Chris
tian Schools, is a society of teachers not taking
Holy Orders, founded at Rheims in 1680 by St.
Jean Baptiste de La Salle. In order not to come
into competition with the Jesuits the Christian
Brothers were forbidden to teach Latin. This
restricted them to a less fashionable and less profit
able field, but the whirligig of time has tended to
reverse the advantage, for today in the United
States classical education is less in demand than
English and engineering courses.

The segregation of the sexes above the elemen
tary grades is a feature of Catholic education
that distinguishes it from the prevailing American
practice. The Reverend Francis Cassilly, S. J.,
of St. Xavier College, Cincinnati, says1: "Co
education and female teaching in boys' high schools
are radically wrong from a pedagogical, a civil, and
a religious standpoint."

An important field of the Catholic schools in the
past has been in the education of the children of
immigrants, and for this reason the instruction
has often been given in foreign tongues and by

1 Bulletin Catholic Educational Association, February, 1912,
p. 30.

206 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

European teachers. But the Great War, by slack
ening the tide of immigration and accelerating the
process of Americanization, has tended to obliterate
this characteristic of Catholic education

CHAPTER XIV

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

We believe that in the schools of applied science and technology
as they are carried on today in the United States, involving the
thorough and most scholarly study of principles directed imme
diately upon useful arts, and rising, in their higher grades, into
original investigation and research, is to be found almost the per
fection of education for young men. — Francis A. Walker.

AGRICULTURE and fishing were at first the principal
industries of the American colonies, and the mother
country discouraged rather than favored efforts
to establish others. American enterprise was re
stricted by the navigation and trade laws enacted
early in the reign of Charles II and supplemented
by later measures, and it was also limited by re
strictions on the right to manufacture freely. The
iron and beaver-hat industries, if not destroyed by
British legislation, were held down within narrow
limits. To restrictions on colonial trade and in
dustry were added irritating taxation and prohibi
tions on paper money. It was such arbitrary in
terference with their economic independence that

207

208 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

led the colonists to turn to the idea of political
independence.

Besides the artificial and legislative restrictions
imposed upon manufactures and commerce by the
mother country, the natural impediments in the
way of establishing industries in a new land were
often insurmountable. Resources were undevel
oped, and the population was scanty and scattered.
Skilled mechanics were hard to get, even when
there was capital to employ them. Colonists who
possessed some degree of knowledge of industrial
processes had little chance to exercise their tech
nical ability and so to transmit it to the next
generation.

It was because the ministers of New England
were appalled by the thought that their flocks
would be left to an unlettered ministry that they
established colleges for the education of their suc
cessors. It was also perceived that the younger
generation was likely to grow up idle and ignorant
for lack of training in the trades. The first public
school law, the Massachusetts Ordinance of 1642,
deals with the training of children "in learning and
labor." It insists that they be taught " to read and
understand the principles of religion and the capi
tal laws of this country," and it also stipulates that

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION 209

they be provided with hemp and flax and "the
tools and implements for working out the same."
The early educational laws of the other colonies
also lay stress upon the importance of training in
the crafts, but all relied, as was the custom in Eng
land, upon the apprentice system to carry it out.
Where the educational needs of the apprentice
conflicted with the financial interests of the master,
however, the latter were likely to receive first con
sideration. For the master the educational system
provided no substitute. The world was slow to
bridge the gap between pure science and applied
science, and there were few who realized in the
eighteenth century that the university professor
might teach the crafts without lowering his dignity.
Jefferson was one of the few. His ambitious design
for a State University included "a school of tech
nical philosophy" with a very comprehensive kind
of university extension. Jefferson believed that:

To such a school will come the mariner, carpenter,
shipwright, pump maker, clock maker, mechanist, op
tician, metallurgist, founder, cutler, druggist, brewer,
vinter, distiller, dyer, painter, bleacher, soap maker,
tanner, powder maker, salt maker, glass maker to
learn as much as shall be necessary to pursue their art
understandingly of the sciences of geometry, mechan
ics, statics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hydrodynamics,

210 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

navigation, astronomy, geography, optics, pneumatics,
acoustics, physics, chemistry, natural history, botany,
mineralogy, and pharmacy.

But Jefferson did not live to see such a school es
tablished, and indeed it would be hard to find one
even today which the mariner, the carpenter, and
their kind could attend with the assurance of
finding the needed instruction.

For professor of agriculture in the university of
which he was the founder or, as he preferred to be
called, the "father," Jefferson picked out Arthur
Young. It was a pity that he could not get this
excellent man to serve, for the observant author of
Travels in France and Annals of Agriculture might
have done a great deal for the American farmer.
The sage of Monticello also tried to start the sys
tematic acclimatization of useful plants, and during
the last twenty-three years of his life he regularly
received from his friend Thonin, superintendent
of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a box of exotic
seeds which he distributed to various public and
private gardens.

Both Jefferson and Franklin during their resi
dence in France became imbued with the doctrines
of the physiocratic school, which held that agricul
ture was the only real productive industry and that

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION 211

manufacture and commerce were of secondary
importance to a nation. Franklin believed that
sciences could be best learned by practicing them.
Accordingly, in his project for the "Publick
Academy" in Philadelphia, he suggested the
importance of field-work in agriculture:

While they are reading natural history, might not a
little gardening, planting, grafting and inoculating
be taught and practiced; and now and then excur
sions made to the neighboring plantations of the
best farmers, their methods observed and reasoned
upon for the information of youth; the improvement
of agriculture being useful to all, and skill in it no
disparagement to any?

Notwithstanding the diffident way in which Frank
lin introduces this revolutionary suggestion, we
may infer that he was quite positive about its
value and very determined to put it through, for
in his Autobiography he has told us why he found
it politic to modify the dogmatic manner of his
youth and to state a proposal tentatively in order
to secure its acceptance.

Franklin in his Academy at Philadelphia and
Jefferson in the University of Virginia tried to
attract public attention to industrial and especially
agricultural education* but both failed. Other men
of foresight renewed the effort. In 1819 Simeon

212 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

DeWitt, who was for fifty years Surveyor General
of New York State, published a pamphlet entitled
Considerations on the Necessity of Establishing an
Agricultural College and having more of the Children
of Wealthy Citizens educated for the Profession of
Farming, in which he puts the situation clearly:

There are now thousands of wealthy citizens in this
state who do not know what to do with their sons.
In the first place, without any determinate object in
view, they give them a liberal education, or rather,
they send them for four years to a college to obtain
the reputation of having a graduate's diploma, and so
much instruction in the dead languages and the ordi
nary sciences as they are compelled or disposed to at
tend to; after that there are only three professions
from which ordinarily they are to choose their means
of living and rising into consequence — law, physic,
and divinity; but so great are the numbers of young
gentlemen destined for these professions, that their
prospects are truly dismal; but what other provision
can their fathers make for them? Turn them to some
mechanic employment? that is considered too degrad
ing; To manufacturing? it has been tried and proved
ruinous; To mercantile business? that too is over
stocked; To the army and navy? there is little room
there, and many reasons against it. To farming?
nothing, it is said, cart be made by it.

The author then proposes a good sensible plan for
an agricultural college, with farm work for the

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION 213

students and — what some such institutions have
tried to get along without — a "Professor of Prac
tical Agriculture," besides the professor of chem
istry, botany, and other sciences. DeWitt was
more than fifty years ahead of his time, for it was
not until after the Civil War that the necessity for
educating for "the profession of farming" was
generally recognized. But his alma mater, Queens
College, then a classical and sectarian institution
under the control of the Dutch Reformed Church,
has now been transformed into Rutgers College,
the agricultural college of New Jersey, and much
the sort of an institution he desired.

One of the first acts of the new State of Maine
was to incorporate in 1822 the Gardiner Lyceum
"to give mechanics and farmers such an education
as will enable them to become skilled in their pro
fessions."1 Although the Gardiner Lyceum lived
only ten years, it did not live in vain. Its second
principal, John H. Lathrop, served later as presi
dent of three State Universities in the West —
Missouri, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Its first "per
manent instructor in agriculture," Ezekiel Holmes,
only a week before his death in 1865, managed to
persuade the Maine Legislature to pass an act

1 Journal of I he Franklin Institute. 1895.

AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

establishing the College of Agriculture and Me
chanic Arts, which became the University of Maine,
the first State University in New England.

One is reminded of the parable of the sower.
How many seeds fall by the wayside and upon the
rocky places ! How many times the ground has to
be seeded before a crop comes up ! It seems that
only one idea bears fruit out of a million of the
same sort. Among the few that did not perish
but visibly took root at once was the report of
President Wayland to the Corporation of Brown
University in 1850. After showing that the twelve
colleges of New England had fewer students than
ten years before, although endowments had in
creased and fees had been reduced, the report
proceeded to give the reason for this state of affairs :

Our colleges are not filled because we do not furnish
the education desired by the people. . . . We have
produced an article for which the demand is diminish
ing. We sell it at less than cost and the deficiency is
made up by charity. We give it away and still the
demand diminishes. We have in this country one
hundred and twenty colleges, forty-two theological
seminaries, and forty-seven law schools, and we have
not a single institution designed to furnish the agri
culturist, the manufacturer, the mechanic, or the
merchant with the education that will prepare him for
the profession to which his life will be devoted.

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

Trustees of colleges were not accustomed to being
talked to in that tone. Great was the indignation
aroused by Wayland's arraignment. But the fault
was now pointed out so clearly that it could not be
ignored. It was one of omission rather than of
commission. The university in medieval times was
started with the practical and proper purpose of
training for the three learned professions — theol
ogy, law, and medicine. It had continued to per
form this service with increasing efficiency but had
not observed that with the advance of science there
had arisen a new learned profession called, for lack
of a better name, engineering. This required as
long and systematic training as the older profes
sions and was not devoid of a cultural value of its
own, but no adequate facilities had as yet been
provided for it. So long as nine-tenths of the
graduates became preachers, lawyers, and doctors,
the college had no reason to pay much attention
to the rest. But when this proportion was re
versed, evidently the institution was being run in
the interests of the minority.

The first branch of this new profession to demand
attention was naturally land surveying, and the
surveyors were usually among the foremost in urg
ing the extension of education to include applied

216 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

science, especially agriculture. To Washington
and DeWitt, already mentioned, another surveyor
must now be added — Stephen Van Rensselaer, a
descendant of the Dutch patroon of that name who
was granted a wide domain in the Hudson Valley.
It was Stephen Van Rensselaer who first proposed
the Erie Canal and, as State Commissioner, made
the first survey for it in 181 1. He offered to donate
land for a college of agriculture and mechanic arts
on the Fellenberg plan if the State would establish
such an institution. x When the New York Legisla
ture refused, he took it upon himself to found at
Troy a school "for the purpose of instructing per
sons who may choose to apply themselves in the
application of science to the common purposes of
life." The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which
was thus opened in 1825, developed only twenty-
five years later into a full four-year school of en
gineering. The principal object of the founder was
rather a training school for teachers for what today
would be called the "short course" or "extension
work " in agricultural and domestic science. Rens-
selaer's idea of how the sciences should be taught

1 A brief but excellent survey of the early efforts at the educa
tion of engineers will be found in Columbia University Quarterly,
December, 1916.

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION 217

is interesting: "These are not to be taught by see
ing experiments and hearing lectures according to
the usual methods. But they are to lecture and
experiment by turns, under the immediate direc
tion of the professor or competent assistant. Thus,
by a term of labor, like an apprentice to a trade,
they are to become operative chemists." The
"Rensselaer plan" of student demonstrations
spread rapidly to other schools and may be re
garded as the precursor of the modern laboratory
methods and of the close connection between school
and shop which has been established in recent
times at Cincinnati, Gary, and elsewhere.

But the idea has a longer genealogy than that,
and we must here consider influences emanating
from Switzerland and Germany which had much
to do with the development of industrial education
in the United States. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi,
inspired by Rousseau's theory of natural educa
tion, conceived a method of teaching by means of
"object lessons" in place of the traditional verbal
instruction and tried to combine manual with
mental labor. Pestalozzi in turn inspired three
other great educators who in the early years of
the nineteenth century worked out different sides
of his doctrine. Froebel devoted himself to the

218 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

training of children and developed the kindergarten,
which was introduced into the United States about
1870. Herbart developed the psychological prin
ciples of the new education in Germany which,
when brought to America in the nineties, effected
a thorough reformation of methods of instruction.
The third of the disciples of Pestalozzi was a rich
Swiss aristocrat, Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg,
who seized upon the idea of a democratic and prac
tical system of education in which the children of
rich and poor should study and work together and
develop all their faculties through useful labor.
With this object he started a "farm-school" at
Hofwyl, near Bern, in 1806, and before many years
similar industrial institutions had sprung up in
Switzerland and Germany. The movement was
taken up enthusiastically and spread in the United
States by the Society for Promoting Manual Labor
in Literary Institutions. Theological seminaries,
following the lead of Andover in 1826, introduced
manual labor "for invigorating and preserving
health, without any reference to pecuniary profit."
Robert Dale Owen, trained at Hofwyl, made it a
feature of his communistic colony at New Har
mony, Indiana. But as manual labor was ex
tensively adopted in charitable and reformatory

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION 219

institutions, this addition to the curriculum natu
rally did not tend to remove the prejudice pre
vailing in academic circles against the use of
the hands.

As a result of these various attempts to found
Fellenberg schools in America, it was soon realized
that the expectation of making the institutions
self-supporting by student labor was fallacious.
The kind and amount of work that the unskilled
youth could do in time spared from his studies
proved too insufficient to be profitable. The school
either failed altogether or, if it prospered, the irk
some manual labor was gradually eliminated until
only an academy or college of the traditional liter
ary type remained. In cases where the vocational
aspect gained the predominance, an engineering or
trade school resulted. Manual training with a
purely educational aim has been retained in city
schools and is a common feature of the upper
grades. The Swedish sloyd and the Russian sys
tem have had their day and left their traces. The
Tuskegee Institute for negroes, founded in Ala
bama in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, perhaps
most nearly approaches the type toward which the
Fellenberg movement pointed.

Wayland's arraignment of higher education was

220 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

not much overdrawn. Up to the middle of the
nineteenth century the educational needs of the
farmer, the mechanic, and the engineer had been
very poorly provided for. But the experiments
which had failed were not altogether fruitless, and
the efforts of the agricultural and industrial classes
were soon to be crowned with success through the
munificence of the Federal Government. To the
new era inaugurated by the Morrill Act a chapter
must be devoted.

CHAPTER XV

THE MORRILL ACT AND WHAT CAME OF IT

The endowment, support and maintenance of at least one
college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other
scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to
teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and
the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States
may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and
practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits
and professions in life. — The Morrill Act of 1862.

THESE seventy-five words are among the most
important in the history of American education,
for in every State they established institutions of a
new type upon which are now expended more than
$36,000,000 of public funds every year. No other
country has provided so extensive a system of in
dustrial education or has endowed it so liberally.

It is interesting to note that in general the party
favoring the protection of American industries has
done most to promote the research and education
upon which those industries depend. The Tariff

Act of 1861 was drawn up by the same hand that

221

222 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

drafted the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 for the
benefit of industrial education; and the Morrill
Bill, which had been vetoed by the Democratic
President Buchanan, was signed three years later
by Abraham Lincoln.

In an address before the Wisconsin State Agri
cultural Society at Milwaukee in 1859, Lincoln
thus expressed his idea of industrial education :

The old general rule was that educated people did not,
perform manual labor. They managed to eat their
bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the unedu
cated. . . . But free labor says "No." Free labor
argues that as the Author of man makes every indi
vidual with one head and one pair of hands, it was prob
ably intended that heads and hands should cooperate
as friends, and that that particular head should direct
and control that pair of hands. As each man has one
mouth to be fed and one pair of hands to furnish food,
it was probably intended that that particular pair of
hands should feed that particular mouth, that each
head is the natural guardian, director, and protector
of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with
it: and that being so, every head should be cultivated
and improved by whatever will add to its capacity for
performing its charge. In one word, free labor insists
on universal education.

Agricultural societies such as Lincoln was address
ing had existed for a hundred years and had long

THE MORRILL ACT 223

been urging upon the deaf ears of the colleges the
necessity for agricultural education. Washington,
Jefferson, and Franklin were members of the Phila
delphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. As
early as 1799 this society, whose seal bore the
motto "Venerate the Plough," considered plans
for teaching the science and art of agriculture in
the colleges and common schools.

Half a century later a New York society, the
Mechanics Mutual Protection, started a movement
for a "People's College for the purpose of promot
ing literature, science, arts, and agriculture" and,
after ten years of agitation in which the powerful
aid of Horace Greeley's Tribune was enlisted, ob
tained a charter from the Legislature in 1853. The
People's College proposed to give an education
more liberal than those which hitherto had mo
nopolized the "liberal arts." The old-fashioned
colleges as a rule paid scant attention to science
and ignored agriculture; but the trustees of the
People's College were more generously directed to
"make ample provision for instruction in the clas
sics." So, too, the Morrill Act itself expressly dis
claims antagonism to the older education by the
words, "without excluding classical studies."

The People's College, however, could not raise

224 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

enough money to open its doors, and until it did so
the State refused help. President Brown of the
People's College accordingly went to Washington
to lobby for the Morrill bill. The national funds
which were finally obtained through this measure
went to Cornell University, which has in most
respects more than fulfilled the expectations of the
People's College and which was situated appro
priately at Ithaca, the home of Simeon DeWitt.
Another force working toward the Morrill Act
came from Illinois. Jonathan B. Turner, a pro
fessor of Illinois College, Jacksonville, presented
"A Plan for an Industrial University," which was
printed in the United States Patent Office Report
of 1852; and next year the General Assembly of
Illinois memorialized Congress to grant land to
each State for the establishment of at least one
college for agriculture and mechanic arts. The bill
which was introduced by Morrill in 1857 and
passed by Congress but vetoed by President
Buchanan followed closely the Illinois memorial.
After the bill had been vetoed by the President,
Turner continued to work for it and, in the next
presidential contest, obtained the promises of both
Lincoln and his rival Douglas to sign the bill if it
were to come before them. Lincoln was the one

THE MORRILL ACT 225

to whom the opportunity came on July 2, 1862, one
of the darkest days of the Civil War.

Justin S. Morrill, Vermont farmer and Congress
man, was transferred to the Senate in 1867 and
remained in office long enough to see the fruition
of his work. The Morrill Act of 1862 gave to each
State for educational purposes 30,000 acres of land
for each Senator and Representative in Congress.
The second Morrill Act, signed by President Harri
son in 1890, gave to each State $25,000 a year from
land sales though, to prevent diversion of the
funds, it limited the expenditure to instruction in
agriculture, the mechanic arts, the related sciences,
and the English language. The Hatch Act of 1887
gave $15,000 a year to each State for an agricul
tural experiment station, and the Adams Act of
1906 doubled this appropriation. The Smith-
Lever Act of 1914 appropriated funds amounting
to $4,580,000 a year to the several States on the
condition of their providing equal amounts "to
aid in diffusing among the people of the United
States useful and practical information relating to
agriculture and home economics."

Under the first Morrill Act about 13,000,000
acres of the public domain, an area nearly twice as
large as Belgium, have been distributed to the

226 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

States. The total value of the nation's gifts to this
form of education up to the present amounts to
more than a quarter of a billion dollars. The land-
grant colleges and experiment stations now num
ber sixty-nine, for there is one or more in every
State and also in the Philippines, Hawaii, and
Porto Rico, and they give instruction to more than
100,000 students. Besides these colleges there are
1426 agricultural high schools.

The Morrill Act wisely left each State to decide
how it should employ the land scrip bestowed upon
it. In consequence the most diverse institutions
sprang up. In twenty-six States new colleges of
agriculture and mechanics were established. In
nearly half of the States, on the other hand, the
funds were turned over to an existing institution,
usually the State University where there was one.
In Michigan the agricultural college provided by
the State Constitution of 1850 had been opened at
Lansing in 1857. Maryland and Pennsylvania had
each started one in 1859. These were the only
State agricultural colleges established before the
Morrill Act. The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology at Boston, incorporated in 1861, re
ceived two-thirds of the Morrill fund of Massa
chusetts, while the other third went to the Agri-

THE MORRILL ACT 227

cultural College opened at Amherst. Massachu
setts is the only State where "agriculture and the
mechanic arts" are separated.

Since the Morrill Act was passed in the midst of
the Civil War it was natural that it should contain
the phrase "including military tactics." These
three words have had momentous consequence.
The old-time "training days" had long fallen into
desuetude and, except for the private military
academies and West Point, there was practically
no military training given to the young men of
America up to the time of the Civil War. But
at the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1898
the graduates of the land-grant colleges volun
teered promptly, and over a thousand of them ob
tained commissions. By the time the United States
next engaged in war there were over 25,000 such
trained men.

Reference to the clause from the Morrill Act
quoted at the head of this chapter will show that
"agriculture and the mechanic arts" are stated to
be joint objects of educational endeavor. This
connection is historically correct, for the two were
usually combined in movements to establish indus
trial schools. But the success of the movement was
due to the farmers rather than to the mechanics,

228 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

for the farmers, more numerous and in the ear*
Her years of the republic better organized, were
able to exert greater political influence. Such
agrarian movements as the Grange of 1867 and the
People's Party of 1892, which were deeply con
cerned with education, aroused little sympathy
among the laboring classes of the cities; on the
other hand the modern labor and socialistic move
ment, now well organized and powerful, has so far
done little for industrial education. Some labor
men, in fact, have shown a disposition to look with
suspicion upon trade schools, especially when
founded by their employers, as a capitalistic
scheme to make skilled labor cheap and plentiful.
The modern trade-unionist would at any rate be
strongly opposed to the idea of the older mechanic
societies that students should be employed at
productive labor.

The institutions that received the Morrill funds
were at first quite uncertain how to spend them.
It was a long time before the problem of education
in "agriculture and the mechanic arts" was solved
— if, indeed, it may be said to be solved yet. The
land scrip, which was sometimes sold at less than
its par value of $1.25 an acre in order to realize on
it at once, brought the various States sums ranging

THE MORRILL ACT 229

from $50,000 to $750,000. This money was often
wasted in unprofitable work or was spent on educa
tion other than the kind intended. To a small de
nominational classical college it came as a welcome
windfall, yet the academic faculty were apt to fear
the Federal Government as it came bearing gifts,
and the students were disposed to show open con
tempt for the "base mechanicals" and the "cow
colleges." The institution sometimes considered
that it had satisfied the requirements of the law
when it had hired a professor of agriculture, bought
or borrowed a demonstration farm, and fitted up
a shop. The rest of the money could then be used
where it was most needed — to pay the salaries of
the academic professors, most of whom could be
made to figure in some capacity on the faculty list
of the so-called "agricultural course." That bona
fide agricultural students were sometimes few or
none was not surprising and, in the minds of some
of the colleagues of the professor of agriculture, not
greatly to be regretted. Where the agricultural
and mechanical college was distinct from the State
University and even situated in another place,
many of its students showed a preference for the
ordinary literary and scientific courses rather than
for the vocational; and, since the State University

230 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

was likely also to offer courses in engineering, the
two institutions tended to overlap and become
rivals. Although the land-grant colleges were
founded primarily in the interests of agriculture,
yet in their early days the mechanical or engineer
ing courses attracted more students because the
instruction they provided was better organized
and led to more profitable positions. The com
plaint in consequence was made that the agricul
tural colleges were educating not for the farm but
from the farm. They certainly did not serve to
elevate the status of agriculture so long as they
took the brightest boys from the farm and trained
them for city occupations.

But these early defects of agricultural education
have gradually been removed. The Department
of Agriculture at Washington began to take a
fatherly interest in the colleges and experiment
stations and, by good counsel and an occasional
threat of cutting off the appropriation, directed the
funds into their proper channels. As the colleges
developed their own methods of instruction, they
gained confidence in their calling and won the
respect of educators in other fields. The gap be
tween the chemist and the botanist who were igno
rant of farming and the practical farmer who was

THE MORRILL ACT 231

contemptuous of "book-learning" was bridged by
a new order of men with a grasp of both theory and
practice. When the experiment stations demon
strated — as for instance by the milk testing and
bacteriology of the dairy, by the breeding of new
varieties of crops and animals, by the destruction
of insect pests, and by the elimination of tubercu
losis — that the endowment of scientific research
paid the community in concrete coin, they had no
further trouble about getting funds. Through agri
cultural institutions, university extension lectures,
short winter courses, demonstration trains, lending
libraries, correspondence courses, and franked bul
letins, the land-grant colleges now reach two or
three million people a year. They have come to
realize that they have a wider function than train
ing a few expert managers of big farms; they have
to educate a community for country life.

The influence exerted by the Morrill Act is well
set forth in the words of Liberty Hyde Bailey of
Cornell, one of the first to perceive its spiritual
significance and one of the largest contributors to
its realization:

The Land-Grant Act is probably the most important
single specific enactment ever made in the interest
of education. It recognizes the principle that every

232 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

citizen is entitled to receive educational aid from the
government and that the common affairs of life are
proper subjects with which to educate or train men.
Its provisions are so broad that the educational de
velopment of all future time may rest upon it. It ex
presses the final emancipation from formal, traditional
and aristocratic ideas and it imposes no methods or
limitations. It recognizes the democracy of education
and then leaves all the means to be worked out as time
goes on. x

This beneficent legislation, passed by Congress in
the darkest hour of the republic, carried into effect
and combined in a practical way Washington's
idea of national aid and control, Jefferson's physio-
cratic theory of the fundamental importance of
agriculture, Franklin's plans for vocational train
ing, and Lincoln's plea for the education of labor.

1 The Rise of the State Colleges of Agriculture in Cyclopedia of
American Agriculture, vol. iv.

CHAPTER XVI

WOMEN KNOCKING AT THE COLLEGE DOOR

Educate the women and the men will be educated. — Mary
Lyon.

FOR more than two hundred years after the first
colleges were established in America their doors
were barred against women. Even the rudiments
of education were grudgingly granted in colonial
days; and, if any women were bold enough to claim
the privilege of learning the things that men were
encouraged to know, it was at the peril of social
disapprobation. In the dame schools the little
girls were taught to learn the letters from horn
books as well as from their samplers, and penman
ship was more highly esteemed as a fine art than it
is in these days of typewriters and dictaphones.
We must remember, however, that in the manifold
industries of the household — cooking, preserving,
brewing, dairying, soap-making, gardening, spin
ning, dyeing, weaving, millinery, and dressmaking

£33

234 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

— the girls of the colonial period had advantages
for "laboratory practice" in the fundamental in
dustries such as our million-dollar technological
institutes do not afford. It was found desirable
in the interests of domestic economy that they
should also be taught elementary arithmetic.

In the Massachusetts Ordinance of 1642, the
corner-stone of the public school system of the
United States, we see the authorities grappling
with the problem of coeducation, for they held
"that boys and girls be not suffered to converse
together, so as may occasion any wanton, dis
honest or immodest behaviour." But for the first
century and a half after the settlement of the coun
try doors of the grammar schools were kept pretty
tightly closed to the weaker sex. The Hopkins
School of New Haven ruled in 1684 that "all girls
be excluded as improper and inconsistent with such
a grammar school as ye law injoines and as is the
Designe of this settlement." In the early part of
the eighteenth century three-fourths of the women
who were called upon to sign legal documents had
to make their mark. After the Revolution, how
ever, a different spirit began to prevail, and the
girls were allowed to receive instruction after school.
Gloucester in 1790 passed an eight-hour law for its

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 235

schoolmaster in order that he might give two hours
a day "to the instruction of females — as they are
a tender and interesting branch of the community
but have been much neglected in the public schools
of this town." The selectmen of Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, opened in 1773 a school where girls
were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and geog
raphy. David McClure, the Portsmouth school
master, writes in his diary that he had seventy or
eighty misses from seven to twenty years of age, so
that he was obliged to take half of them in the fore
noon and half in the afternoon, and he adds: "This
is, I believe, the only female school (supported
by the town) in New England and is a wise and
useful institution."

We find Franklin as a boy arguing with his chum
in favor of the "propriety of educating the female
sex in learning and their abilities for study" and
later in life recommending "the knowledge of
accounts . . . for our young females, as likely to
be of more use to their children, in case of widow
hood, than either music or dancing, by preserving
them from losses by imposition of crafty men and
enabling them to continue perhaps a profitable mer
cantile house." But even the far-sighted Frank
lin could not have foreseen the modern business

236 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

office with a large part of its work done by
"young females," who, in spite of their clerical
duties, manage somehow to find time for "music
and dancing."

New Orleans claims priority over New England
in the matter of girls' schools, on the ground that in
1727 ten Ursuline sisters from Rouen established a
convent school in that French colony. This school
is still in existence and now gives instruction in
English as well as French. Before 1750 the Mo
ravian missionaries had maintained a school for
girls in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and in 1802 they
opened a Female Academy at Salem, North Caro
lina. The bill that Jefferson introduced into the
Virginia Assembly in 1779 provided for the free
training of all free children, girls as well as boys, for
three years in the three R's, but this bill did not
pass. Ten years later Boston opened elementary
schools for girls and in 1826 a girls' grammar school.

But for the most part and for many years after
this, women had to be content with such crumbs of
learning as fell from the master's table. Here and
there a bright ambitious girl might borrow her
brother's books and rival him in his preparatory
studies, but when he went off to college she could
not follow him. Before the end of the eighteenth

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 237

century Lucinda Foot was certificated as qualified
for entrance to Yale but was debarred from enter
ing. The feminine mind was thought incapable of
the serious learning and logical thought involved
in the study of the ancient languages, higher mathe
matics, and natural sciences. This belief could be
held only so long as no opportunity was afforded to
demonstrate the contrary. After it was found not
impossible for women to acquire higher education,
such a course was still held to be undesirable. In
the coeducational seminaries of New York and
New England all studies were theoretically open to
both sexes, but a girl who insisted upon taking
Greek was regarded, even down to the Civil War,
much as a girl would nowadays who insisted upon
playing baseball. She might do it after a fashion,
but she would be looked upon as offensively mas
culine, and the better she did it the worse for her
reputation. In the course of time the situation has
been curiously reversed, and now in some of our
coeducational colleges a boy who studies Greek is
regarded as effeminate.

The studies that in the early days were regarded
as proper for young ladies were the English and
French languages, with a cautious selection of
polite literature in these languages, a little history,

238 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

or rather biography, devotional and moral reading,
and such ornamental arts as music, sketching, and
dancing. In science astronomy was preferred as
less demoralizing than zoology or botany and less
hard on the hands and nose than chemistry. The
astronomy taught was sometimes and quite prop
erly called "Geography of the Heavens," since it
consisted largely of learning to call the constella
tions by their mythological names. But when
Vassar, the first college for women, was opened in
1865, it could boast of possessing the second largest
telescope in the United States and the greatest
woman astronomer, Maria Mitchell.

The first General Assembly of Alabama in 1820
passed a bill to establish a common school in every
district, an academy in every county, and a State
University with a branch for "female education";
but this ambitious project was never carried out.
To provide for the needs of the women of the
South many seminaries, institutes, and colleges were
started in the first half of the nineteenth century
by Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, "Christians,"
Presbyterians, Masons, Odd Fellows, and private
individuals.1 Some of these institutions were for

1 A full list of these are given in I. M. E. Blandin's History of
Higher Education of Women in the South (1909).

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 239

girls only, and some were coeducational. Of these
Elizabeth Academy, established by the Methodists
in 1818 at Old Washington, Mississippi, and char
tered as a college two years later, claims to have
been the first in the United States to provide col
lege training for women. Georgia Female College,
chartered in 1836 and now known as the Wesley an
Female College of Macon, files a conflicting claim
to be the "oldest regularly chartered institution for
conferring degrees upon wromen in America, if not
in the entire world." Three years later the Judson
Female Institute was established at Marion, Ala
bama, by the Reverend Milo P. Jewett, afterwards
President of Vassar College.

While the South was thus striving to open edu
cational opportunities to women, the North was
making similar efforts and ultimately achieved
greater success. In 1818 Mrs. Emma Hart Willard,
wife of a college professor of Middlebury, published
an Address to the Public outlining A Plan for Im
proving Female Education which was at once bold
and practical. Though, as she said, "the absurd
ity of sending ladies to college may, at first
thought, strike every one to whom this subject
shall be proposed," there were some men to whom
the idea did not seem an "absurdity." Adams of

240 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Massachusetts and Jefferson of Virginia favored
the idea, and a bill appropriating $2000 was intro
duced into the New York Legislature. This meas
ure passed the Senate but failed in the Assembly.
But the city of Troy raised $4000 and established
in 1821 the institution that is today known as the
Emma Willard Seminary.

In 1822 Catherine Esther Beecher founded the
Hartford Female Seminary, which was for many
years the leading school for the higher education
of women in America. The daughter of Lyman
Beecher and sharing the brilliant gifts of his unique
family, Catherine did not lack the enthusiasm, ini
tiative, and originality necessary to a pioneer in
unpopular enterprises. She organized a Female
Seminary in Cincinnati, lectured in the South and
West on the subject of education, especially for
women, and wrote several stimulating and sugges
tive books. One of her hobbies was training in
domestic science in order "that women may be
healthful, intelligent, and successful wives, mothers,
and housekeepers." But nowadays this specialized
study of "household engineering" is common in all
coeducational institutions and is being introduced
into the colleges for women.

But neither Mrs. Willard nor Miss Beecher was

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR

so successful as a young teacher associated with
them in these pioneer enterprises, a lively, good-
humored, fast talking, untidy, red-headed, rosy
cheeked, pious country girl named Mary Lyon.
None knew better than she the value of an educa
tion, for few had worked so hard for one. Mary
Lyon was born in Buckland, Massachusetts, in
1797. Her father died when she was six, leaving
the widow to run the mountain farm with the aid
of her six daughters and one son aged thirteen.
When she was ten years old, Mary got a chance to
work for her board at Ashfield and attend school.
At sixteen she was teaching school for seventy-five
cents a week and board — a good teacher, although
not quite secure in her position because she laughed
too easily. But she saved all her salary and by the
time she was twenty she had earned enough more
by spinning, dyeing, and weaving to pay for her
tuition at Sanderson Academy in Ashfield. "No
one could study like Mary Lyon and no one could
clean the schoolroom with such dispatch," said a
fellow-student. When she applied for instruction
in Latin, the teacher tried to discourage her by
putting into her hands a Latin grammar as she left
the school on Friday night, but Mary turned up
Monday morning with much of it learned by heart

16

AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and with a troubled conscience for having infringed
the fourth commandment. She proved to be the
most brilliant classical scholar of the academy, and
although she worked night and day, often with
only four hours' sleep, nothing weakened her health
and enthusiasm. She put herself through a rigor
ous process of self-training to correct the defects
of her childhood and to learn to speak grammati
cally, dress neatly, and avoid eccentricities in order
that she might achieve the aim of her life, the es
tablishment of an institution where women could
get a higher education than had been hitherto open
to them. She was quick to catch and apply new
ideas in education. The Pestalozzian principle of
engaging the active interest of the pupil by con
crete and objective methods appealed particularly
to her, and she adopted it while teaching at Buck-
land. History she taught as a living thing. Men
tal arithmetic was her hobby. The experimental
method of teaching chemistry she acquired at the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy where, as
we have seen, the founder insisted upon it from the
start. Rensselaer, founded to give instruction to
boys and girls in agriculture and mechanic arts,
subsequently dropped both the agriculture and the
girls but fortunately not before it had educated

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 243

Mary Lyon. For further knowledge of chemistry
and physics she was indebted to Professor Edward
Hitchcock of Amherst College.

Thus equipped as a teacher, but without money
or influential friends and in the face of popular and
professional prejudice, she started upon the ap
palling task of raising money for an unprecedented
undertaking. In three years she had raised $68,-
500 and had put up buildings at South Hadley,
Massachusetts. Though she was told that no girls
would come to such an institution, she provid
ed accommodations for eighty-five. On opening
the doors in 1837 she took in over a hundred girls
and had to turn away many more. The infant
institution was christened "Mount Holyoke Fe
male Seminary" in preference to "The Pangynse-
kean" as Professor Hitchcock proposed to call
it. W. S. Tyler, a trustee of Mount Holyoke
Seminary and later of Smith, says of the criticism
it encountered : "It was unnatural, unphilosophi-
cal, unscriptural, unpractical and impracticable,
unfeminine and anti-Christian, in short all the epi
thets in the dictionary that begin with 'un-' and
'in-' and 'anti-' were hurled against it and heaped
upon it."

Mary Lyon was not deceived by the prevailing

244 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

fallacy of the day that an institution could be
made self-supporting by employing the students at
productive labor but, being a believer in the gospel
of work, she planned to have the necessary house
work of the establishment done by the girls them
selves in order that they might reduce expenses, get
exercise, and, when they later became mistresses of
their own home, be free "from servile dependence
on common domestics." The work required of
students at Mount Holyoke, however, was grad
ually reduced to the care of their own rooms, and
now even this requirement has been dropped.

For a dozen years after Mount Holyoke was
opened, Miss Lyon remained to manage its affairs,
inspire its teachers, and give the girls the benefit
of her sensible philosophy of life. She used to warn
them that it is " the mark of a weak mind to be con
tinually comparing the sexes and disputing and
making out the female sex as something great and
superior." And again she said: "Never teach the
immortal mind for money. If money-making is
your object, be milliners or dressmakers, but teach
ing is a sacred, not a mercenary employment."
What she preached she practiced. She never re
ceived more than $260 a year for teaching. She
never wrote a book or even an article on educa-

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 246

tional methodology. Yet she is accounted one of
the great American educators.

Although Mount Holyoke Seminary was a great
step in advance, it did not yet offer women the
opportunity for collegiate education. It was not
chartered as a college until 1888, and it was five
years after that before it was fully prepared to
carry on collegiate instruction. For the first true
colleges open to women we must turn to the West
and especially to an institution which, though
widely different from the New England seminary
in most respects, was yet founded in the same spirit
of democracy, economy, piety, and industry. Ober-
lin Collegiate Institute, named after the Alsatian
pastor and founder of infant schools, Jean Fred
eric Oberlin, was started in the wilderness of Ohio
by two Congregational home missionaries, John J.
Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart, who planned a
novel kind of collegiate community with many of
the advantages of individual land ownership. The
colonists signing the "Oberlin Covenant" agreed
"to hold and manage our estates personally but
pledge a perfect community of interest as though
we held a community of property." Like others,
the institution was intended to be self-supporting
through the manual labor of the students for four

246 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

hours a day; and, like others, it failed in this
respect. The community farm, sawmill, flour-
mill, and workshop were later sold, and the colony
idea was abandoned, but the institute nevertheless
survived all vicissitudes. Few if any colleges have
had so much opposition to contend with, because
few if any have so radically opposed the prevailing
ideas of their day. The intentions of the founders
are set forth in their first report as follows:

The grand object is the diffusion of useful science,
sound morality, and pure religion among the growing
multitudes of the Mississippi valley. It aims also at
bearing an important part in extending these bless
ings to the destitute millions that overspread the
earth. For this purpose it proposes as its primary ob
ject the thorough education of ministers and pious
school teachers; as a secondary object the eleva
tion of female character. And as a third general de
sign, the education of the common people with the
higher classes in such a manner as suits the nature of
republican institutions.

This was an ambitious programme for a little
wooden building in a clearing of the backwoods of
Ohio, but the most remarkable thing about it is
that the programme has been carried out. In 1833
Oberlin opened with twenty-nine men and fifteen
women. Thus was started the first coeducational

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 247

college in the world. By 1839 it challenged com
parison with the best colleges by publishing in its
catalogue the Yale curriculum in parallel column
with its own. Seventy-nine women had received
the A.B. degree at Oberlin before 1865 when Vassar,
the first women's college, opened; and two hundred
and ninety had passed through the ladies' seminary
course there. The radicalism of Oberlin did not
stop with the admission of women: it admitted
negroes as students. In the same year, 1834,
when Oberlin opened its doors to freedmen, Miss
Prudence Crandall was indicted and imprisoned
in Canterbury, Connecticut, for maintaining a
"school for colored misses" contrary to a special
act of the Legislature. Oberlin also, because of its
abolition principles, was in danger of destruction
by mob violence, and its funds were for a time cut
off. But the first president of Oberlin, the Rever
end Asa Mahan, a graduate of Hamilton College
and Andover Theological Seminary, was an un
compromising champion of free speech and equal
rights. He had been a trustee in Lane Theological
Seminary in Cincinnati but seceded from that in
stitution with four-fifths of the students because
they were forbidden to discuss the question of
slavery. The second president of Oberlin, the

248 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Reverend Charles G. Finney, was in his way no
less radical. He was a converted lawyer, "per
manently retained by Jesus Christ" as he put it,
and one of the foremost evangelists of his day.
After building the Broadway Tabernacle in New
York, he went West to become professor of theol
ogy in Oberlin and later president. There he had
to meet a double opposition — from the church
because of his heretical views, and from the popu
lace because of his teetotalism. But in spite of
everything Oberlin stuck to its principles and
thrived on persecution. Today it is a prosper
ous college of some two thousand students and —
since the world has caught up with it — scarcely
distinguishable from neighboring institutions.

Other colleges in Ohio and adjacent States fol
lowed the path that Oberlin had broken. Horace
Mann adopted coeducation when he founded An-
tioch College, Ohio, in 1853. Other pioneer insti
tutions which deserve honorable mention for their
admission of women are, without reference to their
disputed claims of priority: Lawrence College at
Appleton, Wisconsin (opened 1849); Cornell Col
lege at Mount Vernon, Iowa (1857); Baker Uni
versity at Baldwin, Kansas (1858); and Lombard
University at Galesburg, Illinois (1851). Nearly

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 249

all of the State Universities were coeducational
from the start: Iowa, 1856, Washington, 1862,
Kansas, 1866, Minnesota, 1868; and the others one
by one adopted this system before the end of the
century. In all the Western States women now
have access to higher education on practically the
same terms as men.

In the East, however, it was different. The old
colleges refused to open their doors to women, and
many of them are still closed. It was therefore
found to be necessary and deemed to be desirable
to open separate colleges for women. To Mat
thew Vassar, a millionaire brewer of Poughkeep-
sie, New York, it occurred — or was suggested by
his friend, the Reverend Milo P. Jewett — "that
woman, having received from her Creator the same
intellectual constitution as man, has the same
right as man to intellectual culture and develop
ment.'* This right — the most important because
the most fundamental of woman's rights — was
denied almost everywhere in 1850, but today nearly
every State affords full and free opportunities for
collegiate and university education.

It was Vassar's intention " to build and endow a
college for women that shall be to them what Yale
and Harvard are to young men," and he carried

250 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

out this intention. "Vassar Female College" was
chartered in 1861 and opened in 1865. In the
words of Miss M. Carey Thomas, president of
Bryn Mawr,1 "in Vassar we have the legitimate
parent of all future colleges for women which were
to be founded in such rapid succession in the next
period." These, like Vassar, owe their existence
mainly to the beneficence of some wealthy philan-
thopist. Wellesley College, founded near Boston
by Henry F. Durant "for the glory of God by the
education and culture of women," was opened in
1875. Smith College at Northampton, Massachu
setts, founded by the bequest of half a million by
Miss Sophia Smith, was also opened in 1875. Bryn
Mawr College, founded by Joseph W. Taylor at
Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia, and chartered in
1880, was in operation five years later. Wells
College at Aurora, New York, was founded by
Henry Wells and E. R. Morgan and was chartered
as a college in 1870.

In spite of these and other separate colleges for
women, the demand for the admission of women to
the opportunities of the great universities became
so great that some provision had to be made for

1 Education of Women in Butler's Monographs on Education in
the United States.

WOMEN AT THE COLLEGE DOOR 251

them. A women's "Annex " to Harvard which was
started in 1879 developed by 1894 into Radcliffe
College, affiliated with Harvard University. Bar
nard College for women, which forms a part of
Columbia University, began its work in 1889.

In various ways, according to the social condi
tions and ideals prevailing in different localities,
the need for the higher education of women has
been met. Coeducation is not popular, or at least
not fashionable, in the East; but there are in New
York State alone three coeducational universities
of over six thousand students each — Cornell,
Syracuse, and New York. All the leading univer
sities of the country, East or West, with the excep
tion of Princeton and some Catholic institutions,
admit women to summer schools or make other
provision for them. At Columbia and Yale women
are admitted to the regular graduate course on the
same terms as men.

Of the 563 colleges and universities listed in the
1916 Report of the United States Commissioner of
Education about sixty per cent are coeducational,
twenty-five per cent are for men only, and fifteen
per cent are for women only. Of the institutions
that exclude women more than a third are Roman
Catholic, and many of the others are technical

252 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

schools or theological seminaries. Coeducational
schools now provide about ninety-six per cent of
the elementary education and ninety per cent o*
the secondary education in the United States.
The attendance of women at institutions of higher
education has more than doubled since 1893. The
trend for three decades is shown by the following
figures :

ENROLLMENT OF WOMEN

In women's In coeducational

colleges colleges

1893 12,300 13,058

1903 16,744 26,990

1913 19,142 55,564

If we regard the high schools as giving a liberal
education — and some of them are better than the
colleges of a hundred years ago — more women
than men are being liberally educated. The appre
hensions formerly entertained of physical, mental,
and moral injury to women through college work
have been proved illusory by a half century of ex
perience, and the only questions now under dis
cussion concern the place and the character of such
education.

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW EDUCATION

The democracy which proclaims equality of opportunity as its
ideal requires an education in which learning and social applica
tion, ideas and practice, work and recognition of the meaning of
what is done, are united from the beginning and for all. — John
Dewey.

WHAT is "the new education?" And why is it
called "new"? The second question is perhaps
harder to answer than the first. The new educa
tion is distinguished by the broadness of its course
of study. It is probable that the boy or girl of ten
in a good city school is now learning a greater
variety of interesting and important things than
the average university student of a century ago.
Public education began with what may be called
the "tool" subjects — reading, writing, and arith
metic — because they are chiefly important as
instruments in the acquisition and use of informa
tion rather than bodies of knowledge in themselves.
Then in the early days of the republic there were
added "information" or "content" subjects, such

253

254 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

as geography, history, and natural science. In
very recent years what may be called "self -expres
sion" subjects, including music, drawing, cooking,
carpentry, and calisthenics, were introduced into
the schools as fast as public opinion would permit.
All these have their practical side and in a sense
are "tool" subjects as truly as the three R's, but
they are also designed to provide an opportunity
for a motor response which would balance the ab
stract and bookish studies and give the child who
thinks in concrete terms a chance to show practical
ability and constructive skill.

More significant than the change in the curricu
lum is the alteration which took place in the rela
tion between teacher and pupil. The attempt to
reduce an active child to a state of passive obe
dience in which he would offer the least resistance
to the information poured into him has largely
given place to an attempt on the part of the teacher
to entice the dull or shy youngster into activity.
The old schoolroom motto was: "Don't speak
until you are spoken to!" The new motto might
well be: "Tell me what your thought's like."

Finally, the new education postpones the in
troduction of a new subject until the child can
understand its use in his own life. There can be no

THE NEW EDUCATION 255

question of the soundness of the principle that the
form in which instruction is given should always
take into consideration the age of the child and his
interests at that age, although once in a while the
teacher is disconcerted by finding a pupil who ad
vances too rapidly in the scale of evolution and who
wants to read Alexander Pope when he "ought"
to be enraptured with Indian life as depicted
in Hiawatha.

To a great extent the new education is new only
in the sense that the school now teaches what once
was learned outside its walls. The twentieth cen
tury lad who learns at school to swim, to play ball,
to build bird-houses, to care for a vegetable garden,
or to mend a broken lock, and the girl who studies
cooking, sewing, housework, first aid to the injured,
and piano practice, may graduate no wiser than
the children of a past generation who did all these
things on the farm and went to school for a few
weeks in winter to learn spelling and copper-plate
penmanship. The new methods in education are
largely based on principles that have been the com
monplaces of educational theorists for generations.
But it is not often that the theorist and the practi
cal teacher are one. In America, especially, the
new education has come into existence from the

256 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

actual experience of teachers who had a genuine
love of children and an experimental habit of mind
but very little educational tradition behind them.
America has produced several great school organ
izers and many great teachers but less than her
share of distinguished educational philosophers.
The little republic of Switzerland, which was the
birthplace of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and which
gave to this country our most inspiring teacher of
zoology, Louis Agassiz, and the man who revolu
tionized the teaching of geography in our schools,
Arnold Guyot, has made a greater proportionate
contribution to educational science than the United
States. America has achieved distinction chiefly
in the realization of educational reforms in current
practice. And this we owe not only to such leaders
as Mann, Barnard, and Clinton, but to the faith
ful work of the rank and file of teachers in school
and college.

Very rarely have even the ablest teachers risen
to a place in history, unless they came into promi
nence by their public activities or their productive
scholarship or after leaving the profession. When
they have become famous as teachers it is usually
because their genius has been reflected in the repu
tation attained by their pupils in more spectacular

THE NEW EDUCATION 257

fields. While Mark Hopkins, to select but one
example, was President of Williams College, there
were graduated men later prominent in varied
fields: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field;
David A. Wells, the economist; William Keith
Brooks, the zoologist; James H. Canfield, the
librarian ; Senator John J. Ingalls of Kansas ; Gen
eral Samuel C. Armstrong, founder of Hampton
Institute; and President James A. Garfield. Gar-
field paid to his old college president the famous
tribute that a student on one end of a log and Mark
Hopkins on the other would make a university any
where. We might also include in this list of Wil
liams men two popular authors, Eugene Field and
E. P. Roe, although they did not stay to take their
degrees. The mention of General Armstrong sug
gests another good example of what one might
term "educational heredity," for it was at Hamp
ton Institute that Booker T. Washington received
his education, and he in turn taught in Tuskegee
Institute many of the leaders of the negro race and
the educators of yet another generation.

From the American teachers who have intro
duced new methods into the schools it seems an
injustice to select any, because there is no State in
the Union and probably no large community that

858 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

cannot remember the coming of a teacher whom
pupils and parents recognized as "different," who
turned courses of study upside down, introduced
novel methods, and broke down the barriers which
custom had erected between the teacher and the
taught. The careers of very few must be taken
as typical of the lives and work of many, equally
devoted and equally successful.

One of the names that comes most easily to mind
is that of Edward Austin Sheldon, who founded the
normal school at Oswego, New York. He did not
begin his career, however, by teaching educational
method but by teaching the children of the slums
to read and write. While living in Oswego he was
much affected by the misery of the city poor and
even more so by their ignorance. He helped to
found a "Free School Association" and was re
warded for his efforts by being chosen as school
master at three hundred dollars a year. What the
youngsters thought of his teaching may best be
summarized in the words of his daughter: "As my
father went to work of a morning his warm-hearted
Irish children trooped about him, seizing him by
the fingers or the coat-tails, wherever they could
best catch hold, to the great amusement of the
storekeepers and the passers-by."

THE NEW EDUCATION 259

So well did the free school in Oswego prosper
that Sheldon was called to be superintendent of
schools in the city of Syracuse and later in Oswego.
As superintendent in these two cities, he made the
school system a means to the education of the
teachers as well as the children. His great reform
was in decreasing the use of the text-book and in
creasing the use of object lessons. No teacher
could longer shelter incompetence with the speller
and the geography and reduce the art of instruction
to routine question and answer. From behind the
fallen breastworks of the book emerged a human
being, the teacher, who entered into a personal
relationship with the children and taught from his
own knowledge and with his own skill.

Using the experience he had gathered as a
teacher and a school superintendent, Edward
Sheldon started a normal school in 1861. The new
methods of instruction had one disadvantage as
compared with the old; they were not fool-proof.
Anybody could teach geology or botany from a
book, but to teach such subjects from specimens
required skill to prevent instruction from degen
erating into the presentation of a mere assortment
of unrelated scraps of fact. Therefore school
masters who were simply told by a superintendent

260 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

that the time had come to introduce the "object
method" in their classes were often wholly at a
loss how to set about doing it. To meet this need
the Oswego normal school was founded. It was
not the first normal school in the country, but it
was for its time the most influential, not only
because of the new methods introduced but even
more from the inspiring presence of Sheldon and
the able corps of assistants whom he brought to the
school from different parts of the country and from
foreign nations. Edward Sheldon remained head
of the school until his death in 1897.

One of the most radical innovators who ever
taught in an American school was the gentle New
England philosopher, Amos Bronson Alcott. Al-
cott was born on a Connecticut farm, but he spent
much of his youth peddling books through the
South. Returning to Connecticut in 1823, he took
up school teaching — the usual trade in those days
for a bookish Yankee who did not know just what
use he could make of his talents. In his school at
Cheshire he forthwith began to try various experi
ments. He abolished the old long benches and
gave a separate seat and desk to every scholar,
introduced the use of blackboards, and started a
school library. He gave gymnastics and nature

THE NEW EDUCATION 261

study a far more prominent place in the course of
study than had been the custom even in the best
schools. Perhaps the greatest change he intro
duced was in the method of discipline. He shared
the task of keeping order with his pupils by in
stituting school "juries" to try offenses against the
rules. Definite offices were assigned to the children,
such as superintendent, recorder, librarian, and
conservator. Within a few years from the begin
ning of his pedagogical career Alcott had attained
the distinction of teaching what was called "the
best common School in this State, perhaps in the
United States." In return for his labors, Alcott
received nation-wide fame and twenty-seven
dollars a month.

But such prosperity could not continue. So
many reforms at once aroused the fears of anxious
parents that Alcott was using his school to try out
pet theories on their children while neglecting the
fundamentals of sound knowledge and strict dis
cipline. Forced to resume his travels, Alcott under
took teaching in Boston, in Philadelphia, and in
several smaller cities, but his obstinate refusal to
compromise with the kind of education which par
ents usually expected made it impossible for him to
hold one position for any great length of time.

262 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

Emerson said of this "American Pestalozzi,"
as he was sometimes called: "Alcott declares that
a teacher is one who can assist the child in obeying
his own mind. ... He measures ages by leaders
and reckons history by Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus —
and Pestalozzi. In his own school in Boston when
he had made the schoolroom beautiful he looked on
the work as half done."

What sort of education Alcott had in mind when
he opened his school at the Masonic Temple at
Boston may be seen in quotations from his diary
of 1835:

In addition to the statuary and painting at the school
room I added today a fine cast of Silence. It will aid
me in the work of discipline. ... I have sent to
England for copies of Pilgrim's Progress and Fairy
Queen, since fine copies of neither could be found in
Boston. . . . Except in my own school, I know of no
provision for the culture of the imagination by specific
tuition anywhere in our country ; I seldom hear anyone
speak of the importance of cultivating it. And yet, if
any fact be settled by history, it is that imagination
has been the guiding impulse of society.

If Alcott had lived to attend the normal schools
and teachers' institutes of the twentieth century
he would have heard no lack of talk of the "impor
tance of cultivating the imagination," and he might

THE NEW EDUCATION 263

even have found schools where the child who can
write a fairy story receives more commendation
than an unimaginative classmate whose fancy does
not soar beyond the multiplication table. But in
Alcott's day repression rather than self-expression
was the road to learning, and few understood his
daring paradox: "The true teacher defends his
pupils against his own personal influence."

But in fitting up his school so handsomely Alcott
had broken not only precedents but pocketbook.
After five years the Temple School came to an end,
chiefly because he had offended the community by
admitting a colored girl to his class and by writing
Conversations with Children on the Gospels, a So-
cratic dialogue which strayed too widely from
the path of orthodoxy and conventionality. A
distinguished Harvard professor was quoted
as saying that "one-third of Mr. Alcott's book
was absurd, one-third blasphemous, and one-
third obscene."

Discouraged by these repeated failures, Alcott
abandoned teaching in the formal sense of the word
and devoted the rest of his life to lecturing, writing,
and conversation. At one time he experimented
with a communistic colony, "Fruitlands," where
philosophic discourse might be combined with

264 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

outdoor life and a strict vegetarian diet. Lowell
well summed up his friend Alcott in the lines:

For his highest conceit of a happiest state is

Where they'd live upon acorns and hear him talk

gratis;
And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better.

His daughter, Louisa May Alcott, made use of
these scholastic and communistic experiences in
her Little Men and Transcendental Wild Oats. x

An equally radical but much more influential
and practical teacher was Colonel Parker. Like
many other educational reformers, Francis Way-
land Parker was himself educated in a country dis
trict school and began his teaching career on the
lowest rung of the educational ladder, when a lad
of only sixteen, in the schools of his native State
of New Hampshire. A few years later he was called
to be a principal in Carrolton, Illinois, where the
schools were reputed to be unusually "tough."
Here he showed himself to be the very man for the
place, but his career was interrupted by the out
break of the Civil War. Parker enlisted as a pri
vate and left the army as a brevet colonel with a
brilliant war record.

1 A. Branson Alcott. His Life and Philosophy, by F. B. Sanborn
and W. T. Harris (1893;.

THE NEW EDUCATION 265

After the war, Colonel Parker returned to his old
profession and taught in New Hampshire and in
Dayton, Ohio. In 1872 he went to Germany, then
the fountain-head of educational lore, and on his
return he became superintendent of schools at
Quincy, Massachusetts. Here he found oppor
tunities which any school reformer might envy, for
the local school board, under the leadership of
Charles Francis Adams, one of the most distin
guished and influential of New England statesmen,
gave Parker unlimited power and unhesitating
support. He dropped the speller, the reader, the
grammar, and the copy-book from the schools, and
had the use of the English language taught by
means of ordinary books and papers. Natural
history, with classes both indoors and out, he made
a leading part of the school work even in the lowest
grades. But Parker's most striking innovation was
the encouragement which he gave to the teachers
of Quincy to make experiments on their own ac
count. Too frequently the reforming superintend
ent is a martinet who uses his authority to force
others to carry out his plans blindly and who re
sents any self-assertion from the teacher as dis
loyalty. Superintendent Parker, however, was a
welcome visitor to teacher and pupil alike when

266 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

he entered a classroom, crayon in hand, to give
a demonstration lesson. He sometimes told a
teacher who had ventured on school reforms that
awoke resentment among the conservative: "If
they get after you, they must take me first."

It was not long before Quincy became the most
interesting town in the country to students of edu
cation, and for a time some six thousand visitors
came every year to Quincy to study the schools
and the methods of teaching. Popularity at last
became too much of an interruption to the regular
work, the teachers and pupils felt that they were
on exhibition all day long, and the school board
was obliged to limit the number of visitors. After
five years in Quincy, Colonel Parker went to Bos
ton and then to Chicago, where he was principal
of the Cook County Normal School. Parker once
again found himself the storm-center of a great
controversy. He insisted upon excluding from en
trance to the normal school persons without a good
high school education and this step, though in line
with the demand of the times for a higher standard
in the teaching profession, was widely resented.

There were many, also, who were suspicious of
the attempts to teach without the text-book in the
lower grades. It was not forgotten that a principal

THE NEW EDUCATION 267

had once asked Colonel Parker: "Do you mean
to say that, if the school board made the children
buy spelling books and take them to school, you
wouldn't use them?" "Oh, yes," said the genial
Colonel, "I'd use them; of course I would; I'd put
'em into the stove and heat the house with them.'*

After some years of agitation and debate the
city of Chicago took over the Cook County Nor
mal School, and soon thereafter Colonel Parker
became head of the Chicago Institute, which later
became part of the University of Chicago. The
School of Education of that University soon be
came famous through the work of John Dewey,
who has perhaps done more to spread the ideals of
the new education among the teachers of America
than any other living educator. Dewey brought
to the task what most of the earlier reformers
had lacked, a thorough knowledge of the science
of psychology upon which educational theory and
practice must be based and a full realization of the
social importance of education. x

The value of the changes made in recent years
in the subjects and methods of teaching in Ameri
can schools must await the verdict of the final

1 For a sketch of the life and educational ideals of John Dewey
see the author's Six Major Prophets (1917).

268 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

court of public opinion, and this opinion must be
based upon experience. Some of the critics of
modern education have expressed the fear that, by
overloading the curriculum and laying less empha
sis on memory drill, the teachers of today permit
their pupils to enter business life or college with
very shaky ideas as to the multiplication table and
incapable of writing a correctly spelled letter with
out the aid of a dictionary. The charge of dete
rioration is plausible, but the evidence to prove it is
Jacking. Indeed, an interesting experiment carried
out a few years ago at Springfield, Massachusetts,
seems to indicate the contrary. A set of old ex
amination papers, grades and all, was unearthed
and used for the examination of a large class of
school children. The marks given on the test to
the twentieth century children in such "fundamen
tal" studies as spelling, arithmetic, and geography
showed a great improvement over the grades made
by their forefathers.

Another charge brought against the school of
today is that it is wholly "feminized," owing to
coeducation and the almost universal employment
of women teachers in the elementary grades. In
the four decades from 1870 to 1910 the number of
male teachers in the common schools increased by

THE NEW EDUCATION 269

41 per cent and the number of female teachers by
190 per cent. This change has been due in part to
the disappearance of the prejudices which kept
women from professional life and in part to the
failure of the school authorities to raise salaries
rapidly enough to attract competent men to teach
in the primary and elementary grades. One mem
ber of the British Mosely Commission, which
visited the United States to study the schools,
declared that the low average of attainment in our
high schools could be traced to "the preponder
ance of women teachers," and that to the same
cause might be attributed the deplorable fact that
"the boy in America is not being brought up to
punch another boy's head or to stand having his
own punched in a healthy and proper manner."
Without questioning this British standard of man
liness, one may nevertheless note that, during this
period of "feminization," athletics have had a
phenomenal growth and that the world's cham
pionship in most of the sports has passed into
American hands.

More serious than the complaints of a too elabo
rate course of study and of too much femininity
in the school is the charge that the modern school
permits the machinery of a "system" to eclipse

£70 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the common sense of the classroom. Thus the
plan so well worked out by William A. Wirt in
Gary, Indiana, for a school day which combined
study, play, and work, can be made a mere device
for keeping every part of the school building in use
and so avoiding the expense of new construction.
The idea of education for citizenship by an active
study of the industries upon which our civilization
depends for its existence, rightly advocated by
such educational leaders as Charles W. Eliot and
John Dewey, may easily in mechanical hands de
generate into children's polytechnics. We all know
how much educational malpractice can go on
behind such impressive names as Froebel and Mon-
tessori! But all this simply emphasizes the fact,
as true of the old education as of the new, that edu
cation is at bottom simply an affair of the interest
ing teacher and the interested pupil, and that the
libraries, laboratories, costly equipment, text-books,
school laws, and school methods are but so many
opportunities for the two to get together. On the
whole, it is beyond question that teacher and pu
pil now understand each other more quickly and can
benefit each other more completely because of the
good work done by such men as Sheldon, Alcott,
Parker, Dewey, and their fellow reformers.

THE NEW EDUCATION 271

The United States has been throughout its his
tory an educational experiment station on a con
tinental scale. The diversity of local control, the
parallel systems of public and private institutions
from kindergarten to university, and the freedom
of the frontier communities from tradition have
given opportunity for that variation which is es
sential to all evolution. Visiting educators from
countries such as France and Germany, where the
schools are strictly regulated and centrally con
trolled, are amazed and amused to find some
schools far in advance of their own in equipment
and ideals, while others are using crude and primi
tive methods elsewhere abandoned. But this
differentiation has made it possible to compare the
working of various plans in a way that would be
impossible in a country where greater uniformity
is enforced. Education, since it consists largely in
transmitting to the rising generation the accumu
lated wisdom of the past, is essentially a process
of conservation, and therefore educators have a
natural tendency to become conservative. But
American educators have been comparatively free
from this tendency and have, indeed, sometimes
erred on the other side. They are quick to adopt
— at least in name — new methods from overseas

AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and to borrow bright ideas from one another. If a
school superintendent introduces some educational
novelty, though it may not be altogether original
or very revolutionary, the fame of it speedily
spreads through the land, and other cities take it
up in their eagerness to be in the van of progress,
The voluminous educational literature, the fre
quent teachers' meetings, the county institutes^
and the educational associations afford oppor
tunity for this rapid contagion of ideas. Such a
readiness to change plans sometimes leads to con
fusion and loss of energy. A child who has to alter
the style of his handwriting two or three times is
not likely to leave school a good penman. It has
been found necessary to check by legislation the
disposition to change text-books every year on the
theory that the latest must be the best. But al
though mutability may be a defect of the American
temperament, it is also one of the main factors
in the national progress. If education is to keep
pace with material advance, the teacher must be
as ready as the manufacturer to scrap a piece of
antiquated machinery.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY

Popular education is necessary for the preservation of those
conditions of freedom, political and social, which are indispen
sable to free individual development. — Woodrow Wilson.

THE development of educational institutions in
America has come in part through the normal
growth and multiplication of earlier foundations.
In some instances a transformation so complete
has been effected as to make the old institution
unrecognizable in the new. This is especially the
case with the university. There were "universi
ties" from the beginning of American nationality,
yet the word in its European and modern sense
could hardly be applied to any American institu
tion until ten years after the Civil War, when
graduate and professional work of a high order
began to be undertaken. The German degree of
Doctor of Philosophy was granted for the first time
in America at Yale in 1861. Harvard adopted this

18 273

274 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

degree in 1872 and Columbia in 1884. The Ameri
can colleges formerly followed the custom of the
English in granting the degree of Master of Arts
"in course" to almost anybody who was willing to
pay for it three years after graduation. But in
1874 Yale established the requirement of at least
one year of graduate study, and this has since be
come the general rule. The degree of Doctor of
Philosophy now stands for several years of gradu
ate work including original research. In 1916
American universities granted this degree to 607
persons; and more than half of these degrees were
conferred in the sciences — that is, in subjects
which were not fully received into the curriculum
until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The Centennial Year, 1876, which celebrated
the breaking of the political bonds with England,
may well serve as the date when the American
colleges definitely threw off their subservience to
the English collegiate tradition. This turning
point is marked by the establishment of Johns
Hopkins University, which was chiefly devoted,
after the model of the German university, to gradu
ate study and research and which admits the newer
physical and political sciences to equal rank with
the older linguistic subjects. The leading Eastern

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY 275

colleges set about developing their graduate de
partments, and one by one they began to call them
selves "universities," while the State Universities
of the West strove to live up to their names. By
far the greater part of the graduate work of the
country is done in the endowed universities such
as Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hop
kins, Cornell, Pennsylvania, and Clark, though
some of the State Universities such as Wisconsin,
Illinois, California, and Michigan are sharing
largely in this training.

The era of splendid generosity that set in during
the later eighties transformed the older institutions
and added such new ones as Clark University of
Worcester, Massachusetts, founded by Jonas G.
Clark; the University of Chicago, founded by John
D. Rockefeller; and Leland Stanford, Junior, Uni
versity, founded by Senator Leland Stanford of
California. These three universities, opened be
tween 1889 and 1892, were so well endowed by
their founders that from the start they took equal
rank with institutions a century or more older.

As patrons of the universities usually preferred
to have their donations take the tangible form of
buildings, there soon arose new classrooms, labora
tories, chapels, libraries, and dormitories that quite

276 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

outshone the more primitive and utilitarian struc
tures of earlier days. Formerly buildings had been
put up one by one at long intervals as the needs of
the institution demanded and its funds permitted.
The campus of an old college thus became a sort of
architectural museum with specimens of the chang
ing fashions of a century. But when gifts of
millions came in at one time it was possible to plan
harmonious groups. The University of Chicago
adopted for all its buildings the English collegiate
Gothic in gray limestone and Stanford University
an Hispanic Romanesque style in red and yellow
with mosaic inlays. Harvard erected a unified
group of five marble buildings for its medical
school, and the Massachusetts Institute of Tech
nology in 1916 moved to a new site on the Cam
bridge bank of the Charles River, where a group
of buildings in classic style has been erected.

The imitation of Oxford and Cambridge models
as shown in the new buildings of Princeton, Chi
cago, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere is indicative of
a tendency to turn again to England for educa
tional ideals. Residential halls and common rooms
were established in many places in order to get
something of the English college atmosphere, and
Princeton introduced a preceptorial system of per-

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY 277

sonal instruction in small groups suggested by the
tutorial system of the older British universities.

With increasing wealth and luxury on the part
of the universities came a desire for ceremonial
display. Commencement ceremonies which had
dropped into desuetude were revived and elabo
rated. Academic costumes of the medieval style
were introduced or invented. The fashion spread
like wildfire from East to West, and in a few
years mortar-board caps and gorgeous gowns
were to be seen on almost every campus in
the country.

Coincident and connected with the rise of cere
monial was the development of athletics. In the
early days colleges were disposed to frown upon
student sports and in some cases, as at Princeton,
tried to prohibit them; but in the latter part of the
nineteenth century public games became recog
nized by the college authorities as the most effec
tive form of advertising and by the students as the
quickest road to fame. A gymnasium came to be
considered as necessary as a library, and more
money was spent on a single football game or boat
race than would formerly have sufficed to run the
college for a year. In the modern American uni
versity the stadium has assumed an importance

278 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and popularity such as it has not enjoyed since the
fall of Rome and Byzantium.

The dominant power in undergraduate social life
of today is the fraternity, a unique feature of the
American college, though it corresponds in a way
to the corps of the German universities. We have
already noted the founding, at old William and
Mary in the Year of Independence, of the first
Greek-letter society, Phi Beta Kappa, as a philo
sophical and patriotic organization. In conse
quence of the anti-masonic agitation of 1826 Phi
Beta Kappa abandoned its ritualism and secrecy
and is now simply an honorary fraternity admitting
about a tenth of the seniors, men and women alike,
on the ground of scholarship. But in 1826-27,
even when the popular opposition to secret societies
was most fierce, three fraternities — Kappa Alpha,
Sigma Phi, and Delta Phi — were founded at
Union College, and from this center the movement
spread rapidly though secretly to the New York
and New England colleges. Since then the fra
ternities have continued to thrive and multiply,
although at times college authorities, State Legis
latures, and "barbarian" students have tried to
suppress them. At the present time there are over
two hundred fraternities and sororities, some

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY 279

academic and some professional, some local and some
national, certain of which have as many as seventy-
five local chapters. These societies which were
once outlaws now receive practically official status
in the college organization and, instead of meeting
in woods and cellars, are allowed to have their hand
some chapter-houses on the campus. A few insti
tutions like Princeton retain the old prohibition,
but at Princeton upper-class dining clubs have
grown up which have a strong resemblance to the
Greek-letter fraternities. During the last quarter
of a century the membership of the national fra
ternities has risen from 72,000 to about 270,000, of
whom 30,000 are women. They own or rent 1100
chapter-houses valued at $8,000,000.

The chief characteristics of the recent period of
American education are expansion and diversifica
tion. Higher education has burst through the four
walls and four years that formerly confined it and
has overflowed the land. The number of students
studying the classics increases year by year, but
the number studying new subjects increases much
more rapidly. The older colleges in the country
are thriving and doing better work than ever, but
the city institutions have expanded more rapidly.

The rigid requirements for entrance to college

280 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

and the prescribed course afterwards were broken
down, and the elective system provided a place for
new studies. The efforts of Jefferson to introduce
election into Virginia and of George Ticknor to do
the same for Harvard had been, as we have seen,
unsuccessful; but, when Charles William Eliot,
a chemist with radical ideas in education, became
President of Harvard in 1869, he was able in the
course of the next twenty-five years to provide
for a completely elective system. The example of
Harvard was followed somewhat hesitatingly by
almost all the others.

Another university president of similar initiative,
William Rainey Harper, had the opportunity in
the University of Chicago of creating a new institu
tion instead of reforming an old one and was thus
able to introduce many innovations that have been
generally adopted. One of these, the continuation
of college work throughout the summer, enables
the ambitious student to complete a four years*
course in three and gives teachers from other in
stitutions an opportunity to carry on graduate
work. The university of Chicago imported the
idea of extension courses from Oxford and also es
tablished correspondence courses. Other agencies
for making education accessible to the largest

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY 281

possible number of students Harper derived from
the Chautauqua Institution, in which he had long
been active. The Chautauqua movement started
in a camp-meeting of Sunday School teachers at
Chautauqua Lake, New York, in 1874. Similar
assemblies were established in other States and not
only served to stimulate interest in systematic
reading but afforded a platform for the free dis
cussion of public questions that has had as great an
influence over politics as the earlier lyceum move
ment. From the platform of the Chautauqua as
semblies held every year it is possible to speak to
five million people.

It is usual now for the city universities to give
public lecture courses, provide evening classes,
and otherwise extend their privileges to those not
enrolled as regular students. Through the initia
tive of the late Dr. Henry M. Leipziger, the City of
New York has established a system in the school
buildings of free evening lectures which are at
tended by a million adult auditors a year.

Besides stimulating and satisfying the educa
tional demands of the American people, the uni
versities have extended their influence to foreigners,
both by drawing them to this country and by es
tablishing schools in other lands. As the home

282 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

missionary movement started most of the colleges
west of the Alleghanies, so the foreign missionaries
carried the American college around the world.
In China there are eighteen colleges and univer
sities established by American missionaries. In
Turkey the American schools accommodate five
thousand collegiate students. Such institutions as
Robert College and the American College for Girls
at Constantinople and the Syrian Protestant Col
lege at Beirut have trained the leaders of the
new nationalities emerging from the chaos of the
Great War.

The sudden extension of American sovereignty
in 1898 over eight million Filipinos, mostly illiter
ate, brought a new demand upon the American
school system to which it has nobly responded.
The Government undertook the unprecedented
task of teaching the whole of the rising generation
a new language. Before the cannon were cool,
schools had been opened with soldier teachers.
The first Philippine Commission called for a thou
sand schoolmasters to be sent from America, and
these volunteer teachers followed closely behind
the volunteer army as it progressed in the pacifica
tion of the archipelago. More than $3,000,000 a
year is now spent on education in the Philippines.

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY 283

This is seven times as much in proportion to the
population as the Dutch spend in Java and six
times as much as the British spend in India for
that purpose.

When Japan was opened to the world by Com
modore Perry in 1854, American missionaries and
teachers took ah active part in the work of regen
eration during the Era of Meiji or Enlightenment.
The mission schools soon began to send back stu
dents who often beat the American boys in their own
field. The Japanese were later followed by Chinese
in still larger numbers, owing in part to the remis
sion of $12,700,000 of the Boxer indemnity on the
understanding that the Chinese Government would
employ it in sending Chinese students to America.
There are now about 2000 Chinese in American
preparatory schools and colleges taking chiefly
engineering and the industrial sciences.

More recently students from India began to
come in large numbers. They are not usually, like
the Japanese and Chinese, sent with the aid or en
couragement of the Government but on the con
trary are largely nationalists opposed to the British
rule. Naturally many young people come from
Hawaii, the Philippines, Porto Rico, and Cuba to
be educated in the States, and more than formerly

284 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

are coming from South America, especially Brazil.
Owing again to mission schools, Armenian, Syrian,
Turk, Persian, and Bulgarian students are here by
the hundreds. These divers nationalities are usu
ally organized, together with a limited number of
American students, into Cosmopolitan Clubs, and
this association during the period of life when
friendships are formed most easily has done much
to cultivate what President Butler calls "the
international mind" in American universities.

The Great War proved what had sometimes been
questioned — that the United States was a united
people. In spite of the diversity of racial elements
and family connections with all the belligerent
nationalities in Europe, the youth of this country
responded with little hesitation to the call to arms.
Few European countries showed such unanimity of
opinion in this crisis. The process of Americaniza
tion had been more complete than even the optimis
tic had hoped; and the chief credit for this belongs
to the public school system.

Americans had a double duty laid upon them.
They had to educate not only their own children
but also the immigrants. Though the latter might
not be illiterate, they had usually to be taught the

THE UNIVERSITY OF TODAY 285

English language and American ideals. No people
ever had such a task as this before — to assimilate
a million foreigners a year — and it is perhaps the
finest thing which could be said of the American
school that it has with almost incredible complete
ness accomplished this gigantic feat of naturaliza
tion through education.

The pay-roll of an American coal mine or steel
works today reads like an ethnological map of the
Balkans, yet the children of the workmen are thor
oughly Americanized. Feuds two thousand years
old, based on racial, religious, and linguistic differ
ences, are here wiped out in a single generation.
The tourist traveling a thousand miles across the
United States will observe less contrast in costume
and custom, in dialect and mode of thought, than
he would while traveling a hundred miles in many
parts of Europe. Yet the American school is not a
leveling machine. Its aim is not the suppression
but rather the cultivation of natural diversity.
The "melting-pot" metaphor does not mean that
sometime there is to be poured out a homogeneous
alloy to solidify like the nations of the Old World.
The melting-pot is to be kept melting. The Ameri
can idea is to maintain the mass constantly fluid
so that individual particles may rise and fall accord-

286 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

ing to their specific gravity. Americanization
means the obliteration of the nationalistic, tradi
tional, and class distinctions of Europe in order
that the real and personal distinctions may develop.
Equality, in the American sense of the word, is not
an end but a beginning. It means that, so far as
the State can do it, all children shall start in the
race of life on an even line. The chief agency for
this purpose is the public school system; and this
aim has already been so far accomplished that in a
large part of the country a youth of sufficient abil
ity to profit by the opportunity can get any educa
tion he needs, up to the highest professional train
ing, without spending any money other than what
he can make by his own exertions during his course

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

THE most useful single work of reference on education
in America is the Cyclopedia of Education (1911-13),
5 vols., edited by Paul Monroe, Professor of the His
tory of Education in Columbia University. The ar
ticles by more than a thousand individual contribu
tors give a list of the best books on each topic which
may be used as a guide to further reading. The annual
Report of the United States Commissioner of Education
(usually obtainable from Washington for the asking)
is now issued in two volumes : the first contains reports
of all important movements in education here and
abroad, with accounts or abstracts of conventions,
surveys, legislation, books, and similar matter; the
second volume contains the statistics of schools of all
grades. These volumes really form an annual ency
clopedia and current history of education. Besides
this work, the Bureau of Education publishes various
historical monographs in the form of circulars and
bulletins and a monthly bibliography of educational
literature.

The series of twenty brief monographs on Education
in the United States (1900), 2 vols., prepared under the
editorship of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of
Columbia University, for the Paris Exposition of 1900,
gives a survey of the field at that date with some

287

288 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

historical background. Those who wish to explore more
thoroughly the byways of educational history will find
of interest the special studies in the volumes of Henry
Barnard's American Journal of Education (1855-1882),
32 vols. Richard G. Boone's Education in the United
States (1889) and Edwin G. Dexter's History of Educa
tion in the United States (1904) are detailed chronicles
in the general field of American education. But for
later and more adequate studies the reader should
consult the monographs in the Columbia University
Contributions to Philosophy, Psychology, and Educa
tion; and Columbia University, Teachers College,
Contributions to Education. A valuable special study
on land grants and other public endowments is Frank
Blackmar's History of Federal and State Aid to Higher
Education (1890).

Three useful works by Frank Pierrepont Graves of
the University of Pennsylvania — The History of Edu
cation in Modern Times (1913), A Student's History of
Education (1915), and Great Educators of Three Cen
turies (1912) — relate American education with the
educational history of Europe. In this connection
should also be mentioned Will S. Monroe's important
History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United
States (1907). The History of Higher Education in
America (1906), by Charles F. Thwing of Western
Reserve University, is a good narrative of college and
university development made especially interesting
by quotations from contemporaries and by accounts
of college life. For those interested in the relation
of American education to the strife of political par
ties and social classes no better book could be re
commended than Frank Tracy Carlton's Economic

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 289

Influences upon Educational Progress in the United
States, 1820-1850 (1908).

For contemporaneous records and pictures of school
life the reader can find what he wants in such books as
W. H. Small's Early New England Schools (1914),
Clifton Johnson's Old Time Schools and School Books
(1904), and Emily N. VanderpoeFs Chronicles of a
Pioneer School (1903).

A. E. Winship's Great American Educators (1900),
a volume of brief biographies for school reading, will
be found by adults quite as profitable as less interest
ing books. Those who care to study more closely the
lives of leading educators will find available abundant
material impossible to list in this place. Few educators
of note have gone without their Boswell, and some,
such as Horace Mann, have become the theme of a
veritable library. There are also special histories for
every important college and university. Great Ameri
can Universities (1909), by Edwin E. Slosson, gives
journalistic impressions of fourteen leading American
institutions.

On Catholic education the reader should consult
The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-12), 15 vols.; the
works of the Reverend James A. Burns, The Catholic
School System in the United States (1908), Catholic
Education (1917), and Growth and Development of the
Catholic School System in the United States (1912); and
also the History of the Catholic Church in the United
States by J. G. Shea (1886-92), 4 vols. The fascinating
story of the Kentucky pioneer priests may be found in
Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions in Kentucky
(1844) by M. J. Spalding and in the lives of Nerinckx
by Hewlett and Maes.

290 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For a more detailed account of the Catholic teach
ing communities, founded and organized by remark
able women, the reader should consult: M. A. McCann,
The History of Mother Seton's Daughters (1917); Mary
Aloysia Hardey, Religious of the Sacred Heart (1910);
Anna B. McGill, The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth,
Kentucky (1917); George Parsons Lathrop, A Story of
Courage (1894); M. J. Brunowe, The College of Mt. St.
Vincent (1917).

In the footnotes to the body of this volume the atten -
tive reader will have found several references to other
books dealing with various special topics. In addition
to the biographies of educators and chronicles of
schools and colleges, there are monographs on educa
tional history for most parts of the Union and even on
the school systems of important towns and cities. Will
S. Monroe's Bibliography of Education (1897) will help
the conscientious student to find his way through the
forest of earlier educational literature, and the current
files of educational periodicals will enable him to keep
abreast with the incessant output of new works in the
same field.

INDEX

Academia Virginiensis et Oxon-
iensis, name for proposed
college in Virginia (1624), 82

Academies, 111-15; attitude
toward high schools, 115;
George Clinton on, 143

Adams, C. K., adopts German
seminar method, 178

Adams, H. B., Thomas Jeffer
son and the University of
Virginia, cited, 89 (note)

Adams, John, 101; and French
educational ideals, 169; and
education of women, 239-40

Adams, J. Q., and national
university, 102; Mann suc
ceeds in Congress, 135

Adams Act (1906), 225

Agassiz, Louis, 256

Agricultural colleges, first at
Lansing (Mich.), 176; Jeffer
son's plan, 209-10, 211;
DeWitt's plan, 212-13;
Queens College becomes
agricultural, 213; Maine
College of Agriculture and
Mechanic Arts, 213-14;
under Morrill Act, 226-27;
see also Morrill Act

Alabama, school legislation,
238

Alcott, A. B., 260-64, 270

Alcott, Louisa May, daughter
of A. B., 264

American Academy of Arts and
Sciences founded, 169

American Catholic Quarterly,
cited, 199 (note)

American College for Girls,
Constantinople, 282

American Journal of Education,
138-39

American Philosophical So
ciety, 74

Americanization through pub
lic school system, 284-86

Amherst Agricultural College,
226-27

Amish in Pennsylvania, 37

Annapolis, King William's
School, 41; Naval Academy
at, 99

Antioch College, 160; Mann
president of, 135, 136; co
education, 248

Apprentice system, 209

Argentina, schools influenced
by Horace Mann, 137

Arizona, Catholic, 182

Arkansas, teaching communi
ties of women in, 197

Armenia, students from, 284

Armstrong, General S. C.,
257

Arnold, Matthew, tries to
introduce German methods
into English schools, 175

Athletics, 61-62, 269, 277-78

B

Badin, Father S. T., first priest
ordained in United States,
195

291

292

INDEX

Bailey, L. H., on influence of
the Morrill Act, 231-32

Baker University, Baldwin
(Kan.), admits women, 248

Baltimore, First Provincial
Council, recommendations
on religious education (1829),
198; Third Plenary Council
orders parochial schools
(1884), 198-99

Bancroft, George, sent to Got-
tingen, 173

Bancroft, H. H., History of
California, cited, 187 (note)

Baptist Church, in Pennsyl
vania, 37; and Brown Uni
versity, 56; education of
women in South, 238

Barnard, Henry, 256; life, 137-
138; edits Connecticut Com
mon School Journal, 138; as
college president, 138; first
United States Commissioner
of Education, 138; edits The
American Journal of Educa
tion, 138-39; Stoweand, 161

Barnard College, 251

Barrett, Samuel, teacher of
Horace Mann, 125

Beaurepaire, Chevalier Ques-
nay de, 169

Beecher, Catherine Esther, 240

Beecher, Lyman, 240

Bell-Lancaster system, 145-46,
148

Benedictines, colleges, 204-05

Berkeley, Bishop George,
benefactor of Yale, 55

Berkeley, Sir William, Gover
nor of Virginia, 81, 83

Blair, Rev. James, and found
ing of College of William and
Mary, 83-84; president of
William and Mary, 85

Blake, Sophia Jex, A Visit to
Some American Schools and
Colleges, cited, 62 (note)

Blandin, I. M. E., History of
the Higher Education of

Women in the South, cited,
238 (note)

Blodget, Samuel, Economica,
quoted, 97

Blodget, Major William, 97

Bohemia Manor (Md.), Jesuit
school, 191

Borica, Governor, orders Span
ish taught in missions, 187

Boston, Franklin bequeaths
fund to, 75-76; English
Classical School for Boys.
115; schools for girls, 115,
236; Alcott's Temple School,
262, 263

Boston Grammar School,
Franklin at, 65

Boston Latin School, founded
(1635), 4; Cheever as head
of, 11

Bouquillon, Rev. Thomas,
Education: To Whom Does It
Belong ?, 200

Brazil, students from, 284

British Mosely Commission,
269

Broadway Tabernacle, New
York City, Finney builds, 248

Brooks, W. K., 257

Brown, President of People's
College, 224

Brown University, Baptists
found, 56; tolerance, 56;
Mann at, 125; Wayland's
report (1850), 214-15

Bryn Mawr College, 250

Buchanan, James, vetoes Mor
rill Bill, 222, 224

Buffalo, Christliche Welt,
quoted, 202 (note)

Bulgaria, students from, 284

Butler, N. M., 284; Mono
graphs on Education in the
United States, cited, 250
(note)

Cabell, J. C., Jefferson writes
to, 94-95

INDEX

California, Catholic, 182;
Franciscans in, 185, ISO-
IS?

California, Lower, missions in,
185-86

California, University of, at
Berkeley (Cal.)> 55; becomes
coeducational (1870), 179;
graduate work, 275

Cambridge University, Ameri
can youth attracted to, 44;
American university build
ings modeled after, 276

Canfield, J. H., 257

Carnegie, Andrew, 69, 76

Carolinas, school laws, 42-43;
see also North Carolina,
South Carolina

Carroll, Charles, of Carrollton,
191

Carroll, John, Bishop of Balti
more, 182, 191, 193; at
Jesuit college, 191

Carter, J. G., 127

Cassilly, Rev. Francis, on
coeducation, 205

Catholic education in America,
181 et seq.\ bibliography,
289-90

Catholic Educational Associ
ation, Proceedings (1918),
cited, 187 (note); Proceed
ings (1917), cited, 201
(note)

Catholic University of America,
Washington, 204

Catholics, in Pennsylvania,
36-37; and Public School
Society, 146-47, 197; popu
lation, 182-83; education
of women in South, 238;
colleges non-coeducational,
251; see also Catholic edu
cation

Cecil, Father, starts school in
New Orleans (1722), 188

"Central College of Virginia,"
Jefferson's plan, 86-90

Charleston (S. C.), schools, 42

Chautauqua Institution, 281

Cheever, Ezekiel, 11-12

Chicago, city takes over Cook
County Normal, 267

Chicago Institute, 267

Chicago, University of, School
of Education, 267; graduate
work, 275; founded by
Rockefeller, 275; archi
tecture, 276; Harper and,
280

China, colleges established by
American missionaries, 282;
Boxer indemnity students,
283 m

Christian Brothers, Colleges,
205

Christian Church, education of
women in South, 238

Church of England, position
with reference to education
in colonies, 29; see also
Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel; in Pennsyl
vania, 37; and King's
College, 56; and College of
William and Mary, 86

Cincinnati, Catherine Beecher
organizes Female Seminary
in, 240

Claiborne-Ingle rebellion, 189

Clark, J. G., 275

Clark University, graduate
work, 275; founded, 275

Clarke, John, Essay upon the
Education of Youth in Gram
mar Schools, 121-22

Classics, Latin grammar
schools in New England, 9-
12; in schools of New
Netherlands, 29; in colonial
colleges, 48-49; Franklin
and, 72-73; attitude toward
study of Greek, 237; increase
in number of students, 279

Clinton, DeWitt, 256; and the
free school, 141 et seq.\
quoted, 141; first student at
Columbia, 142; and Public

294

INDEX

Clinton, DeWitt— Continued
School Society, 144-46; as
Governor of New York,
147-48; educational inter
ests, 147-48

Clinton, George, 143

Coeducation, in New England,
17-18, 234; in State Univer
sities, 179-80; Catholic view
of, 205; in colleges (1916),
251-52; in schools, 252; see
also Girls, Women

Cogswell, Dr. J. G., 173

Colleges, Dutch colonists and,
23; Friends indifferent to,
35-36; American boys sent
to English, 44; colonial, 46
et seq.; growth of American
system, 48; curriculum, 49-
50, 57-58; college life and
discipline, 58-64; Catholic,
203-04; in New England,
208; entrance requirements,
49, 279-80; see also names of
colleges, State Universities,
Universities

Colorado, school teachers from
East, 2

Columbia University, King's
College becomes Columbia
College, 142; Regents and,
143; Barnard College forms
part of, 251; degrees, 274;
graduate work, 275; see also
King's College

Commencement ceremonies,
62, 277

Common School Journal, 128

Congregational Church in New
England, 30

Connecticut, school law as
model, 1; education in, 8-9,
19-20, 105; Barnard's work
in, 137-38, 139

Connecticut Common School
Journal, 138

Cook County Normal School,
Parker principal of, 266,
267

Cooper, Thomas, at Univer
sity of Virginia, 89; Jeffer
son's letter to, 90

Cope, E. D., paleontological
investigations in Trans
actions of American Philo
sophical Society, 74

Corlett, Elijah, 12

Cornell, Ezra, and coeducation,
179-80

Cornell College, Mount Ver-
non (la.), 248

Cornell University, coedu
cation, 179-80, 251; State
University in type, 180;
obtains national funds, 224;
graduate work, 275

Cosmopolitan Clubs, 284

Cotton, Edward, endows
Catholic school of Newtown
(Md.), (1653), 189-90

Cousin, Victor, report on Prus
sian school system, 175

Crandall, Prudence, impris
oned for maintaining school
for negroes, 247

Cuba, students from, 283

Curtius, Dr. Alexander, 25-26

D

Dame schools, 18-19, 233
David, Father, organizes Sis
ters of Charity of Nazareth,

196

Degrees, 50, 273-74
Delaware, early schools, 38-39;

independence of districts,

107
Delaware River, Swedes and

Dutch on, 37
Dewey, John, 69, 89, 270;

quoted, 253; at University of

Chicago, 267
DeWitt, Simeon, 216, 224;

and agricultural education,

211-13
Discipline, in colonial schools,

17; at Harvard, 51-52; in

INDEX

295

Discipline— Continued

American colleges, 58-61;
Jefferson and, 92; in district
schools, 108-09

District school system, 105-
111

Domestic science, Catherine
Beecher and, 240

Dominicans, in Lower Cali
fornia, 186; and Catholic
University of America, 204

Dorchester (Mass.), public
school established, 4

Dover (N. H.), petition from,
6-7

Draper, researches in Trans
actions of American Philo
sophical Society, 74

Dubourg, Rev. William, Sul-
pician, 192

Dunkers in Pennsylvania, 37

Dunster, Henry, President of
Harvard, 52-53

Durant, H. T., founds Welles-
ley College, 250

Dutch on the Delaware, 37,
39; see also New Nether-
land

Dutch Reformed Church, in
Pennsylvania, 37; and
Queens College, 56

Dutch West India Company,
23, 25

Dwight, Edmund, and Lexing
ton normal school, 128

E

East Jersey, school law, 40;
see also New Jersey

Eaton, Nathaniel, first Presi
dent of Harvard, 51-52

Eaton Free School, 80

Eddis, William, quoted, 44-45

Elective system, Jefferson and,
91, 174; Ticknor and, 91,
173-74; spread of, 91; in
secondary education, 114;
Eliot and, 280

Elementary schools, teachers'
salaries, 12-13; curriculum,
13-14, 26; text-books, 14-
15; schoolhouses, 15-16;
recitations, 16-17; discipline,
17; see also District school
system, Public schools

Eliot, C. W., 69, 177, 270,
280

Eliot, Rev. John, 12

Elizabeth Academy, Old
Washington (Miss.), 239

Emerson, R. W., quoted, 74;
on Alcott, 262

Emery, Father, Superior Gen
eral of the Sulpicians, 193

Emma Willard Seminary, Troy
(N. Y.), 240

Engelhardt, Rev. Zephyrin,
Catholic Educational Work in
Early California, cited, 187
(note)

Engineering, in State Univer
sities, 167; a new learned
profession, 215; land survey
ing, 215-16; see also Techni
cal education

England, educational ideals
from, 276

Episcopalian Church, see
Church of England

Erie Canal, Van Rensselaer
proposes, 216

Everett, Edward, at Got-
tingen, 173

Experiment stations, 226, 230

Extension work, University of
Chicago, 280; Chautauqua
Institution, 281; New York
City lectures, 281

"Faribault Plan," 201-02
Fellenberg, P. E. von, 218
Fellenberg movement, 218-19
"Female seminaries," 112-13
Field, Eugene, 257
Field, Justice S. J., 257

296

INDEX

Finney, Rev. C. G., second
President of Oberlin, 247-
248

Fithian, Philip, account of
student life at College of
New Jersey, 60-61

Fitzpatrick, E. A., The Edu
cational Views and Influence
of DeWitt Clinton, cited, 148
(note)

Flaget, Father, Sulpician, 192,
196

Flexner, Abraham, 69

Florida, Catholic, 182; Fran
ciscan missions, 183

Florida, University of, not
coeducational, 179

Flower, Enoch, 35

Foot, Lucinda, debarred from
entering Yale, 237

France, and State University,
169; opinion of American
schools, 271

France, University of, 170

Franciscans, in Florida, 183;
in New Mexico, 183-84; in
California, 185, 186-87; in
Lower California, 186; and
Catholic University of
America, 204

Franklin, Benjamin, and
practical education, 65 et
seq.\ early life and education,
65-67; establishes the Junto,
67; circulating library, 67-
68; Proposals Relating to
the Education of Youth in
Pensilvania, 69-72; Proposal
for Promoting Useful Know
ledge Among the British
Plantations in America, 73-
74; American Philosophical
Society, 74; The Cause and
Cure of Smoky Chimneys, 74;
Boston and Philadelphia
funds, 75-76; Poor Richard's
Almanack, 76; as an econo
mist, 76-77; and electricity,
77; quoted, 77; fond of telling

Seymour's retort to Blair,
84 (note); and the physio-
cratic school, 210-11; mem
ber of Philadelphia Society
for Promoting Agriculture,
223; and vocational training,
232; on education of women,
235-36

Franklin (Mass.), named for
Benjamin Franklin, 68; Hor
ace Mann born in, 68, 124

Franklin College, German Col
lege of Lancaster (Penn.)
becomes, 75

Franklin Institute, 75

Franklin Union, 76

Fraternities, 278; see also Phi
Beta Kappa

"Free School Association,"
Sheldon helps found, 258

Free School Society, 144; see
also Public School Society

French Revolution and the
Sulpicians, 192

Friends, and education, 35-36;
effect of religious tolerance
on education, 36-37

Froebel, F. W. A., 217-18

"Fruitlands," Alcott's com
munistic colony, 263-64

G

Gardiner Lyceum, 213

Garfield, J. A., 257

Gary (Ind.), Wirt's system of
education, 217, 270

Geneva, University of, pro
posal to transplant to
United States, 101

Georgetown University, 191

Georgia, education in, 43;
"university," 143

Georgia Female College (Wes-
leyan Female College of
Macon), 239

Georgia, University of, organ
ized (1785), 168; not coedu
cational, 179

INDEX

297

German College of Lancaster
(Penn.), 75

Germans, in Pennsylvania, 37-
38, 151-52

Germany, Horace Mann and
schools of, 130, 131-32;
influence on State Univer
sities, 172 et seq.\ American
students in, 172-74; opinion
of American schools, 271

Girard, Stephen, 75

Girard College, 74-75

Girls, education in early New
England, 17-18; in New
Netherland, 27; academies,
112-13, 114; see also Coedu
cation, Women

Gloucester (Mass.), eight- hour
law for schoolmaster, 234-
235

Goodrich, C. A., A History of
the United States of America,
cited, 120 (note)

Graduate work, 273-75

Grammar schools, see Latin
grammar schools

Grange movement, 228

Grant, U. S., and national
university, 102

Great War proves Americani
zation of United States
people, 284

Greek, see Classics

Greek-letter fraternities, see
Fraternities, Phi Beta
Kappa

Greene, General, and national
university, 97

Guyot, Arnold, 256

Hall. B. R., quoted, 104
Hamilton, Alexander, and

" University of the State of

New York," 170
Hamilton, Sir William, plea

for British university reform,

175

Hampton Institute, Armstrong
founder of, 257; Booker T.
Washington at, 257

Harper, W. R., President of
University of Chicago, 280-
281

Harris, W. T., 139, 175; A.
Branson Alcott, His Life and
Philosophy, cited, 264
(note)

Harrison, Benjamin, signs sec
ond Morrill Act, 225

Harrison, W. H., signs act
establishing Vincennes Uni
versity, 161

Hartford (Conn.), schools
established, 8

Hartford Female Seminary,
240

Harvard, John, 46, 47

Harvard University, cosmo
politan, 2; grammar schools
near, 10; Harvard's bequest
to, 46-47; early entrance
requirements, 49; curricu
lum, 49-50; degrees, 50,
274; "disputations," 50-51;
early presidents, 51-53;
theological battleground,
51-53; and Yale, 53; edu
cational monopoly, 54; Will
iam and Mary second to, 84;
and elective system, 91,
280; State appropriations to,
180; Radcliffe College affili
ated with, 251; graduate
work, 275; medical school
buildings, 276

Hatch Act (1887), 225

Hawaii, land-grant college,
226; students from, 283

Hayden, F. V., paleontological
investigations in Trans
actions of American Philo
sophical Society, 74

Hayes, R. B., and national
university, 102

Henrico (Va.), plan for college
for Indians at, 81

298

INDEX

Henry, Joseph, experiments in
Transactions of American
Philosophical Society, 74

Herbart, J. F., 218

High schools, establishment of,
111, 115-17; coordination
with university, 178; see also
Secondary education

Hingham (Mass.)» teachers'
salaries, 13

Hinsdale, B. A., Notes on the
History of Foreign Influences
upon Education in the United
States, cited, 174 (note)

Hitchcock, Edward, 243

HofwyJ, "farm-school" at, 218

Holmes, Ezekiel, 213

Honor system, 92

Hopkins, Mark, 257

Hopkins School, New Haven,
234

Horn-books, 14

Hoyt, J. W., President of
Wyoming, 102; urges na
tional university, 177 (note)

Hughes, Bishop of New York,
197

Huxley, T. H., quoted, 165

I

Illinois, teachers from East, 2;
land grants for common
schools, 159; development of
colleges, 163-64

Illinois College, Jacksonville,
Turner a professor in, 224

Illinois Industrial University,
see Illinois, University of

Illinois State Normal Univer
sity, 164

Illinois, University of, origin,
164; becomes coeducational
(1870), 179; graduate work,
275

Immigration, effect on edu
cation in New York, 33;
effect in Pennsylvania, 36;
Catholic, 182; Catholic edu

cation of children of immi
grants, 205-06

India, students from, 283

Indiana, land grants for com
mon schools, 159; establish
ment of colleges, 161-63

Indiana, University of, Vin-
cennes University becomes,
162; coeducational, 179;
Lathrop, President of, 213

Indians, raids an obstacle to
learning, 6-7; Society for
the Propagation of the Gos
pel and, 30, 32; London
Company makes grant for
college for, 81-82; Clinton
favors education of, 148;
and Florida missions, 183;
and Franciscans in New
Mexico, 183-84; in Califor
nia, 185, 186-87

Industrial education, Lincoln's
idea of, 222; see also Techni
cal education

Ingalls, J. J., 257

Institute of Brothers of the
Christian Schools, 205

Iowa, University of, coedu
cational, 179, 249

Ireland, Archbishop John,
devises "Faribault Plan,"
201; appeals to Rome, 202

James, E. J., President of
University of Illinois, 102;

James, William, 89

James River Company, Wash
ington gives shares to Lib
erty Hall Academy, 98

Japan, students from, 283

Jay, John, and Jefferson's plan
of public education, 170

Jefferson, Thomas, Priestley
and, 74; and State edu
cation, 78 et seq., 94-95; at
College of William and
Mary, 84; and University of

INDEX

299

Jefferson, Thomas — Continued
Virginia, 87-93, 170; Essay
toward facilitating instruction
in Anglo-Saxon and Modern
Dialects of the English Lan
guage, cited, 88 (note); epi
taph, 93; and national uni
versity, 100-01, 102; and
Washington, 101; and Ques-
nay de Beaurepaire, 169;
French influence, 170; and
elective system, 174, 280;
and Ursuline school, 188-89;
technical education, 209-10,
232; member of Philadelphia
Society for Promoting Agri
culture, 223; introduces bill
providing education for girls
and boys, 236; and educa
tion of women, 240

Jesuits, found college at Que
bec, 184; industrial colonies
in Paraguay, 185; in Lower
California, 185-86; expelled,
186; deported from Mary
land, 189; school in New-
town (Md.), 190; school in
New York City, 190;
employed as tutors in
Maryland, 190; preparatory
school at Bohemia Manor,
191; Georgetown College,
191; colleges, 204

Jewett, Rev. M. P., 239, 249

Jogues, Father, Jesuit, visits
Manhattan (1644), 182

John of Nassau, quoted, 22

Johns Hopkins University,
established, 274; graduate
work, 274, 275

Johnson, Clifton, Old- Time
Schools and School- Books,
cited, 16 (note)

Johnson, Samuel, first Presi
dent of King's College, 32;
quoted, 57-58

Judson Female Institute, Mar
ion (Ala.), 239

Junto, 67

Kansas, teachers from East, 2

Kansas, University of, coedu
cation, 179, 249

Kemp, W. W., The Support of
Schools in Colonial New
York by the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts, cited, 33
(note)

Kentucky, Virginia and, 95;
Catholics in, 195-97; teach
ing communities of women,
196-97

Kilpatrick, Dutch Schools of
New Netherland, cited, 27
(note)

King William's School, Annap
olis (Md.), 41

King's College, Johnson as
President of, 32, 57-58;
Anglican, 56; renamed Co
lumbia, 142; see also Colum
bia University

Knight, Public School Edu
cation in North Carolina,
cited, 154 (note)

Lalor, Alice, opens school for

girls at Georgetown, 194
Lancaster (Penn.), German

College, 75
Lancaster plan of teaching, see

Bell-Lancaster system
Land grants, in New Jersey,

40; federal, 157 et seq.; see

also Morrill Act
Land Ordinance of 1785, 159
Lane Theological Seminary,

Cincinnati, Mahan and,

247
Lansing (Mich.), agricultural

college, 226
La Salle, St. Jean Baptiste de,

founder of Christian Broth
ers, 205

300

INDEX

Lathrop, J. H., 213

Latin grammar schools, 111;
in New England, 9-10; in
New Netherland, 24; in
Maryland, 41-42

Laval, Bishop, 184

Laval University, 185

Lawrence College, Appleton
(Wis.), 248

Legislation, Alabama, 238;
Connecticut, 1, 19-20;
Maine, 213-14; Maryland,
41; Massachusetts, 1, 4-6,
19-21, 115, 208-09, 234;
Michigan, 171, 172, 175,
178; New York, 28-29, 143-
144, 148-49; North Carolina,
42; Pennsylvania, 34-35,
152-53; South Carolina, 41,
42; training in crafts, 209;
Virginia, 82-83; see also
Morrill Act

Leidy, Joseph, paleontological
investigations in Trans
actions of American Philo
sophical Society, 74

Leipziger, Dr. H. M., and New
York lecture system, 281

Leland Stanford, Junior, Uni
versity, founded, 275; archi
tecture, 276

Leo XIII, Pope, establishes
Catholic University of
America, 204

Leverett, John, President of
Harvard, 53

Lexington (Mass.), first nor
mal school in America, 128

Liberty Hall Academy be
comes Washington and Lee
University, 98

Libraries, Franklin and, 67-69

Lincoln, Abraham, and Morrill
Acts, 222, 224-25; on indus
trial education, 222, 232

Lombard University, Gales-
burg, (111.), 248

London Company of Virginia,
79-80, 81

Longfellow, H. W., student in

Germany, 174
Lorettines, see Sisters of Lo-

retto

Louisiana, Catholic, 182
Louisiana Purchase, 188
Lowell, J. R., on Alcott, 264
Lutheran Church in Penn
sylvania, 37

Luyck, Rev. ^Egidius, 26
Lyon, C. H., Causes of the
Backward State of Sound
Learning of the United States,
cited, 122 (note)
Lyon, Mary, quoted, 233; life
and education, 241-43; and
Mount Holyoke, 243-45

M

McClure, David, on education
of girls, 235

Macon, Wesleyan Female Col
lege of, 239

Madison, James, and national
university, 102

Magazines as text-books, 121-
122

Mahan, Rev. Asa, first Presi
dent of Oberlin, 247

Maine, teachers' salaries, 13;
and agricultural education,
213-14

Maine, University of, 214

Mann, Horace, 256; life and
education, 68-69, 124-26;
and the American school,
124 et seq.\ secretary of
Massachusetts Board of
Education, 126-34; Com
mon School Journal, 128;
and teachers' training,
128-29; and teaching of
music, 129-30; criticism of.
130-31, 133-34; German in
fluence, 131-33, 175; elected
to Congress, 135; President
of Antioch College, 135,
248; death (1859), 135;

INDEX

301

Mann, Horace— Continued
interests, 135-36; estimate
of, 136-37; inspired by
Stowe, 161

Manual training, 217-19

Marion (Ala.), Judson Female
Institute, 239

Marists and Catholic Univer
sity of America, 204

Marshall, John, at College of
William and Mary, 84-85

Martin, G. H., Evolution of the
Massachusetts Public School
System, cited, 18 (note)

Maryland, public schools, 41-
42; number of Catholics in
(1789), 182; origin of Catho
lic education in, 189; agri
cultural college, 226

Mason, Lowell, and music
teaching, 130

Masons, education of women
in South, 238

Massachusetts, school law
(1647), 1, 5-6; school law
(1642), 4-5, 208-09, 234;
grammar schools, 10-12;
school law (1789), 19-20;
district schools, 105-06; see
also District school system;
law of 1827, 106; academies,
113; high school law, (1826),
115; Horace Mann in, 139;
contrasted with New York
in methods of education,
141; see also Boston, Har
vard University

Massachusetts Bay, first col
ony to establish public
schools, 3-4

Massachusetts Institute of
Technolcgy, 226, 276

Mather, Cotton, 11, 12, 51, 53,
67

Mather, Increase, 53

Mayflower, the (ship), 79

Mechanics Mutual Protection
Society, 223

Medicine, first school in Amer

ica at University of Penn
sylvania, 73; in State Uni
versities, 167; architecture
of Harvard school of, 276

Mennonites in Pennsylvania,
37

Methodist Church, in Penn
sylvania, 37; education of
women in South, 238; Eliza
beth Academy, 239

Mexico, secularizes missions,
187; appropriates Pious
Fund, 188

Miami University, 160

Michigan, "university" ex
periment, 143; agricultural
college, 226

Michigan, University of,
"mother of the State Uni
versities," 169; modeled
after University of France,
171; German influence, 175-
176; rectoral plan, 176; ad
mits women (1870), 179; State
support, 180; graduate work,
275.

Military education, 99-100,
227

Minnesota, University of, co
educational, 179, 249

Mississippi Valley, colleges
established, 156

Missouri, teaching communi
ties of women, 197

Missouri, University of, be
comes coeducational, 179;
Lathrop as President of,
213

Mitchell, Maria, 238

Monroe, James, at College of
William and Mary, 84; and
national university, 102

Monroe, Paul, Cyclopedia of
Education, cited, 159 (note)

Monteith, Rev. John, at Uni
versity of Michigan, 172

Moravians in Pennsylvania,
37, 38; schools for girls,
236

302

INDEX

Morgan, E. B., founder of
Wells College, 250

Merrill, J. S., 225

Morrill Act, 164, 220, 221 et
seq.

Morse, Jedediah, 119

Motley, J. L., student in Ger
many, 174

Mount Holyoke College,
" Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary," 243-45; char
tered as college (1888), 245

Mount St. Mary's, Emmits-
burg (Md.), 191-92

Music, Horace Mann intro
duces into public schools,
129-30

N

Napoleon and University of
France, 170

National Association of State
Universities endorses na
tional university, 102

National Educational Associ
ation endorses national uni
versity, 102

National University, Wash
ington and, 95 et seq.; Hoyt
urges, 177 (note)

Nazareth (Penn.), Moravian
school for girls, 236

Neale, Father, President of
Georgetown College, 194

Negroes admitted to Oberlin,
247

Nemours, Dupont de, Jefferson
and, 170

Nerinckx, Father, in Ken
tucky, 195, 196

New Amstel (New Castle,
Del.), Dutch teacher at,
25

New Amsterdam, public
school, 24; Latin school
started (1652), 25

"New education, the," 253 et

New England, schools of early,
1 et seq.; Church of England
schools in, 30; colleges
established, 208; state of
colleges (1850), 214; frater
nities in colleges of, 278

New England Primer, 14-15

New England's First Fruits,
quoted, 46

New Hampshire follows school
system of Massachusetts, 8

New Harmony (Ind.), com
munistic colony, 218

New Haven, school laws, 8;
Yale College moved to, 54

New Jersey, College of (Prince
ton), 56, 60-61; see also
Princeton University

New Jersey, schools, 39-40

New Mexico, Catholic, 182;
Franciscan missions, 183

New Netherland, schools in, 22
et seq.

New Orleans, elementary edu
cation begun (1722), 188;
girls' schools, 236

New Sweden, schools, 38-39

New York, English edu
cational work in, 28 et seq.;
Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel in, 30-31;
tries to make schools demo
cratic, 141; public school
system established, 144; bill
for education of women,
240; coeducational univer
sities, 251; fraternities in
colleges, 278; see also New
Netherland

New York City, law to provide
public support of teacher
in (1702), 28-39; Trinity
Church Charity school, 31;
high schools, 115; Public
School Society, 144-47, 197;
debt to DeWitt Clinton,
145; Jesuit school (1684),
190; Catholic schools, 197;
"no Popery" agitation in.

INDEX

303

New York City — Continued

197-98; free lecture system,

281
New York, College of the City

of, 147

New York University, 251
New York, University of the

State of, 142-43, 170
Newport (R. I.) establishes

town schools, 7
Newspapers as text-books,

121-22
Newtown (Md.), Catholic

school, 189-90
Normal schools, 128-29, 176,

258, 259-60, 268, 267
North Carolina, appeal to

Legislature against general

education, 153-54; public

schools established, 154;

Constitution provides for

university, 168; see also

Carolinas

O

Oberlin, J. F., 245

Oberlin College, 160; Oberlin
Collegiate Institute founded,
245-46; first coeducational
college, 246-47

"Oberlin Covenant," 245

Odd Fellows, education of
women in South, 238

Ohio, teachers from East, 2;
land grants for common
schools, 159; colleges of,
160

Ohio Company, 159-60

Ohio State University, 160

Ohio, University of, 160

Oftate, Juan de, expedition in
to New Mexico (1598), 183

Ordinance of 1787, quoted,
155

Oswego (N. Y.), normal school,
258, 259-60

Owen, R. D., 218

Oxford University, American

youth attracted to, 44;
Rhodes scholarships, 45;
American college buildings
modeled after, 276

Palmer, Edwin, plans univer
sity in Virginia, 82
Parker, Colonel F. W., 264-67,

270

Parker, Theodore, and Hor
ace Mann, 136
Paulist Fathers and Catholic

University of America, 204
Penn, William, quoted, 34;

settlement planned by, 34
Pennsylvania, teachers from
East, 2; schools, 34-38, 151-
153; school laws, 34-35; 152-
153; Constitution provides
for university, 168; Catho
lics in, 182, 194; agricultural
college, 226

"Pennsylvania Dutch," 37
Pennsylvania, University of,
independent of denomina
tional influence, 57; Frank
lin's Academy develops in
to, 73, 112; graduate work,
275; architecture, 276
People's College, 223-24
People's party (1892), 228
Perry, Commodore, opens

ports of Japan, 283
Persia, students from, 284
Pestalozzi, J. H., 217
Phi Beta Kappa, 62, 85, 278
Philadelphia, Flower opens
school in, 35; William Penn
Charter School, 35; Franklin
in, 66; Franklin and schools
of, 74-75; Franklin be
queaths fund to, 75-76; high
schools, 115; first Catholic
parochial school, 195; "no
Popery" agitation, 197-98;
Franklin's project for "Pub-
lick Academy," 211

304

INDEX

Philadelphia Society for Pro
moting Agriculture, 223

Philippine Islands, Catholic,
182; land-grant college, 226;
education in, 282-83; stu
dents from, 283

Phillips, Wendell, 136

Phillips Academy at Andover
(Mass.), 112

Phillips Academy at Exeter
(N.H.), 112

Pierce, Cyrus, 128-29

Pietersen, Evert, 26

Pious Fund, 188

Plymouth (Mass.), provides
instruction (1670), 3; merged
with Massachusetts, 3

Porto Rico, Catholic, 182;
land-grant college, 226;
students from, 283

Portsmouth (N. H.), school for
girls, (1773), 235

Potomac River Navigation
Company, Washington gives
shares to found national
university, 93

" Poughkeepsie Plan," 201

Presbyterian Church, College
of New Jersey, 56; education
of women in South, 238

Priestley, Joseph, Experiments
and Observations on different
kinds of air, 74

Princeton University, honor
system at, 92; buildings,
276; personal instruction,
276-77; and Greek-letter
fraternities, 279; see also
New Jersey, College of

Providence (R. I.), establishes
town schools, 7

Public School Society, 144-47,
97

Public schools, origin of Amer
ican, 1 et seq.\ arguments
against in New York, 150-
151; Catholic teachers in,
200-01; curriculum, 253-54;
complaints against, 267-70;

see also, District school sys
tem, Elementary schools.
High schools, Rural schools.
Secondary schools
Pupil teaching, 145-46
Purdue, John, 162
Purdue University, 162

Q

Quakers, see Friends

Quebec, Jesuits found college
at (1635), 184; Laval Uni
versity, 185

Quebec Seminary founded
(1663), 184

Queens College (Rutgers), 56;
becomes agricultural college,
213

Quincy (Mass.), Parker in,
265-66

R

Radcliffe College, 251

Randolph, Peyton, at College
of William and Mary, 84

Recollets in northern colonies,
185

"Rensselaer plan" of student
demonstration, 216-17

Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti
tute, opened (1825), 100,
216; Mary Lyon at, 242-
243

Rhode Island, lack of public
provision for education in,
7; debt to Barnard, 138, 139

Rhodes, Anne, 196

Rhodes, Cecil, 45, 96-97

Richard, Father Gabriel, and
University of Michigan, 172,
192

Richmond (Va.), capital
removed to, 85

Robert College, Constanti
nople, 282

Rockefeller, J. D., founds
University of Chicago, 275

INDEX

305

Rockfish Gap, committee
meets to draw up plan for
"Central College," 86

Roe, E. P., 257

Roelantsen, Adam, 24

Rogers, John, 15

Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted,
168

Round Hill School, 173

Roxbury, Eliot establishes
school at, 12

Rural schools, conditions in
New York, 150

S

S. P. G., see Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts

St. Augustine, classical school
(1606), 183

St. John's College, Barnard as
President of, 138

St. Mary's Seminary, Balti
more, Dubourg founds, 192,
193

St. Omer, College of, Catholic
sons sent to, 190-91

Salaries of teachers 12-13, 26-
27, 204

Salem (N. C.), Moravian
Female Academy, 236

Sanborn, F. B., and Harris,
W. T., A. Branson Alcott,
His Life and Philosophy,
cited, 264 (note)

Sanderson Academy, Ashfield,
Mary Lyon at, 241

San Diego, mission established
(1769), 186

San Jose, Borica opens school
in, 187

San Miguel, mission sold
(1846), 187

Sarmiento, "the Horace Mann
of South America," 137

Saybrook (Conn.), Yale Col
lege at, 54

Schneider, Rev. Theodore,
194-95

School laws, see Legislation

Schoolhouses, in early New
England, 15-16; district
schools, 107-08; community
center, 110

Schwenkfelders in Penn
sylvania, 37

Scotch-Irish establish Liberty
Hall Academy, 98

Secondary education, 111-17;
see also Academies, High
schools, Latin grammar
schools

Serra, Father Junipero, estab
lishes mission at San Diego
(1769), 186

Seton, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann,
193

Seventh Day Baptists in Penn
sylvania, 37

Seward, Governor of New
York, Annual Message
(1842) quoted, 147

Seymour, Attorney-General,
and founding of College of
William and Mary, 83

Sharp, Chaplain John, quoted,
33

Sheldon, E. A., 258-59, 270

Shipherd, J. J., 245

Sisters of Charity, Mrs. Seton
organizes, 193

Sisters of Charity of Nazareth,
196

Sisters of Charity of St. Vin
cent de Paul, 193-94

"Sisters of Loretto," 196

Sisters of St. Dominic, 196-
197

Sisters of the Visitation, 194

Slaves, work of Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel
among, 32

Slosson, E. E., Six Major Pro
phets, cited, 267 (note)

Small, W. IL, Early New Eng
land School*, cited, 5 (note)

306

INDEX

Smith, Sophia, 250
Smith College, 250
Smith-Lever Act (1914), 225
Society for Promoting Manual

Labor in Literary Institu
tions, 218
"Society for the Promotion of

Christian Knowledge Among

the Germans in America,"

37
Society for the Propagation of

the Gospel in Foreign Parts,

29-32, 43
"Society of the Friends of

Mary Sorrowing at the Foot

of the Cross of Our Lord

Jesus Christ," 196
Society of St. Sulpice, see Sul-

picians
South, distinction between

schooling and education, 43;

sends boys to England, 44;

education of women in, 238-

239
South America, students from,

284
South Carolina, tax-supported

county schools, 41; school

laws, 42
South Hadley (Mass.), Mount

Holyoke at, 243
Sparks, Works of Benjamin

Franklin, cited, 84 (note)
Spaulding, Archbishop, quoted,

181

Springfield (Mass.), experi
ment at, 268
Stanford, Leland, 275
Stanford University, see

Leland Stanford, Junior,

University
State Universities, religion in,

157; and land grants, 158;

and denominational colleges,

166; general characteristics,

166-67; rise of, 168 et seq.;

and Catholic high schools,

202-03; coeducation, 248-

249; see also Colleges, names

of colleges and universities,
Universities

Steiner, B. C., History of Edu
cation in Maryland, cited, 42
(note), 45 (note)

Stevens, Thaddeus, 152

Stewart, Rev. K. J., A Geog
raphy for Beginners, 120-21

Stewart, P. P., 245

Stowe, C. E., 160-61

Student Army Training Corps,
100

Sulpicians, in North, 185;
Mount St. Mary's College,
191-92; fugitives from
France, 192-93; work in
America, 192-94; and
Catholic University of
America, 204

Surveying, see Engineering

Sweden, education in, 38

Swedes, at New Amstel, 25; on
the Delaware, 37, 38

Switzerland, contribution to
educational science, 256

Symms School, 80

Syracuse (N. Y.), Sheldon in,
259

Syracuse University, 251

Syria, students from, 284

Syrian Protestant College,
Beirut, 282

Tappan, H. P., President of
Universitv of Michigan, 175,
176-77

Taunton, (Mass.), teachers'
salaries, 13

Taylor, J. W., 250

Teachers, educational require
ments in New England, 20;
salaries, 12-13, 26-27, 204;
in New Netherland, 27-28;
in Maryland, 41-42; changed
relations with pupil, 254

Technical education, 207 et
seq.

INDEX

307

Tejada, Bishop, reopens semi
nary at St. Augustine (1736),
183

Tennessee, University of, 168

Texas, land grants in, 165;
Catholic, 182

Texas, University of, 165

Text-books, of New England,
1-2, 14-15; of Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel,
31; American, 117-21; Web
ster's, 117-19; newspapers
and magazines as, 121-23

Thomas, M.Carey, quoted, 250

Thonin, superintendent of the
Jardin des Plantes, sends
seeds to Jefferson, 210

Thorpe, George, 81

Thwing, C. F., History of
Higher Education in Amer
ica., cited, 174 (note)

Ticknor, George, 91, 172-73,
280

Tracy, Count Destutt de,
introduces term " Ideology, "
88

Trent, W. P., English Culture
in Virginia, cited, 89 (note)

Tribune, New York, quoted,
149; aids agitation for
People's College, 223

Troy (N. Y.), Van Rensselaer
founds technical school at,
216; see also Rensselaer Poly
technic Institute; Emma
Willard Seminary, 240

Turkey, American schools in,
282; students from, 284

Turner, J. B., 164, 224

Tuskegee Institute, 219, 257

Tyler, John, at College of Wil
liam and Mary, 84

Tyler, W. S., trustee of Mount
Holyoke, quoted, 243

Union College, fraternities
founded at, 278

United States, government
educational agencies, 103;
an educational experiment
station, 271-72

United States Bureau of Edu
cation, Circular of Infor
mation, No. 1, cited, 91
(note)

Universities of today, 273 et
seq.; see also Colleges, names
of colleges, State Univer
sities

Ursuline nuns, in North, 184,
185; convent school in New
Orleans, 188, 236

Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 216

Vassar, Matthew, 249

Vassar College, opened (1865),
238, 247; astronomy at, 238;
Jewett President of, 239;
chartered as " Vassar Female
College" (1861), 250

Vermont, school establishment
in, 8; Constitution provides
for university, 168

Vincennes University, 161-62;
see also Indiana, University
of

Virginia, disputes school pri
macy with New England, 1;
public school system estab
lished, 79; early history of
education in, 79 et seq.; gift
of shares to Washington as
reward for services, 98;
academies, 113

Virginia, University of, Jeffer
son's plan for, 86-88, 170;
curriculum, 87-88; has per
manent president, 92; honor
system at, 92; French in
fluence, 172; elective system,
174, 280; follows German
model, 176; not coeduca
tional, 179; agriculture at,
210, 211

308

INDEX

Visitation Order of St. Francis
de Sales, convent and acad
emy, 194

Vocational specialization, Jef
ferson and, 91; see also Tech
nical education

W

Walker, F. A., quoted, 207

Washington, B. T., 219

Washington, and national edu
cation, 94 et seq., 232; na
tional university, 95-96, 97-
98, 102; on need of military
academy, 99; and agri
cultural education, 216, 223

Washington and Lee Univer
sity, 98

Washington, University of,
coeducation, 249

Wayland, President of Brown
University, 175, 214-15

Webster, Daniel, and Horace
Mann, 135; quoted, 155

Webster, Noah, text-books, 15,
117-19

Wellesley College, 250

Wells, D. A., 257

Wells, Henry, 250

Wells College, 250

Wesleyan Female College of
Macon (Ga.), 239

West, establishment of col
leges, 156; collegiate compe
tition, 157

West India Company, see
Dutch West India Com
pany

West Jersey, education in, 40;
see also New Jersey

West Point, Military Acad
emy at, 99-100

Western Literary Institute,
160

Western Reserve University,
160

White, Father Andrew, 189

White, A. D., President of Cor
nell, 102, 175, 178, 180

Willard, Mrs. Emma Hart, A
Plan for Improving Female
Education, 239

William and Mary, College of,
founding of, 82 et seq.; Phi
Beta Kappa founded at, 85,
278; represented in Virginia
House of Burgesses, 85;
closed for seven years, 86;
Episcopalian, 98; Washing
ton and, 98

William Penn Charter School,
35

Williams, Roger, 52

Williamsburg, capital removed
from, 85; in Revolutionary
and Civil Wars, 86

Wilson, Father, 196-97

Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 273

Wirt, W. A., 270

Wisconsin, federal land grant,
164

Wisconsin State Agricultural
Society, Lincoln's address
before, 222

Wisconsin, University of, Bar
nard as Chancellor of, 138;
founded (1848), 164; Lath-
rop as President of, 213;
graduate work, 275

Women, Clinton favors higher
education for, 148; admis
sion to State Universities,
179-80; Catholic teaching
communities, 196-97; Catho
lic University of America
conducts summer school for,
204; higher education for,
233 et seq.; early curriculum
for, 237-38; teachers in ele
mentary grades, 268-69; col
lege attendance (1893-1913),
252; see also Coeducation,
Girls

Woodward, Judge, plans Uni
versity of Michigan, 171

Woolsey, T. D., 174

INDEX

309

Yale, Elihu, 55

Yale University, cosmopolitan,

2; founding of (1701), 53-54;

degrees, 273, 274; graduate

work. 275

Young, Arthur, chosen pro
fessor of agriculture by
Jefferson, 210

Ypsilanti (Mich.), normal
school, 176

AN OUTLINE OF THE PLAN .OF
THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA

The fifty titles of the Series fall into eight topical sequences or groups,
each with a dominant theme of its own—

I. The Morning of America
TIME: 1492-1763

£ theme of the first sequence is the struggle of nations for the
possession of the New World. The mariners of four European king
doms — Spain, Portugal, France, and England — are intent upon the
discovery of a new route to Asia. They come upon the American continent
which blocks the way. Spain plants colonies in the south, lured by gold.
France, in pursuit of the fur trade, plants colonies in the north. Englishmen,
in search of homes and of a wider freedom, occupy the Atlantic seaboard.
These Englishmen come in time to need the land into which the French
have penetrated by way of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, and a
mighty struggle between the two nations takes place in the wilderness,
ending in the expulsion of the French. This sequence comprises ten volumes:

I. THE RED MAN'S CONTINENT, by Ellsworth Huntington
1. THE SPANISH CONQUERORS, by Irving Berdine Richman

3. ELIZABETHAN SEA-DOGS, by William Wood

4. CRUSADERS OF NEW FRANCE, by William Bennett Munro

5. PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTH, by Mary Johnston

6. THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND, by Charles M. Andrews

7. DUTCH AND ENGLISH ON THE HUDSON, by Maud Wilder Goodwin

8. THE QUAKER COLONIES, by Sydney G. Fisher

9. COLONIAL FOLKWAYS, by Charles M. Andrews

IO. THE CONQUEST OF NEW FRANCE, by George M. Wrong

II. The Winning of Independence
TIME: 1763-1815

The French peril has passed, and the great territory between the Alta
ghanies and the Mississippi is now open to the Englishmen on the seaboard,
with no enemy to contest their right of way except the Indian. But the
question arises whether these Englishmen in the New World shall submit
to political dictation from the King and Parliament of England. To decide
this question the War of the Revolution is fought; the Union is born:
and the second war with England follows. Seven volumes:

11. THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION, by Carl Becker

12. WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES IN ARMS, by George M. Wrong

13. THE FATHERS OF THE CONSTITUTION, by Max Farrand

14. WASHINGTON AND HIS COLLEAGUES, by Henry Jones Ford

15. JEFFERSON AND HIS COLLEAGUES, by Allen Johnson

16. JOHN MARSHALL AND THE CONSTITUTION, by Edward S. CoriDltt

17. THE FIGHT FOR A FREE SEA, by Ralph D. Paine

III. The Vision of the West
TIME: 1750-1890

The theme of the third sequence is the American frontier — the conquest
of the continent from the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean. The story covers
nearly a century and a half, from the first crossing of the Alleghanieo by
the backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas (about
1750) to the heyday of the cowboy on the Great Plains in the latter part
of the nineteenth century. This is the marvelous tale of the greatest migra
tions in history, told in nine volumes as follows:

1 8. PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST, by Constance Lindsay Skinner

19. THE OLD NORTHWEST, by Frederic Austin Ogg

20. THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON, by Frederic Austin Ogg

21. THE PATHS OF INLAND COMMERCE, by Archer B. Hulbert

22. ADVENTURERS OF OREGON, by Constance Lindsay Skinner

23. THE SPANISH BORDERLANDS, by Herbert E. Bolton

24. TEXAS AND THE MEXICAN WAR, by Nathaniel W. Stephenso*

25. THE FORTY-NINERS, by Stewart Edward White

l6. THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER, b'J Emerson Hough

IV. The Storm of Secession
TIME: 1830-1876

The curtain rises on the gathering storm of secession. The theme of the
fourth sequence is the preservation of the Union, which carries with it the
extermination of slavery. Six volumes as follows:

27. THE COTTON KINGDOM, by William E. Dodd

28. THE ANTI-SLAVERY CRUSADE, by JeSSC Macy

29. ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION, by Nathaniel IV. Stephenson

30. THE DAY OF THE CONFEDERACY, by Nathaniel W. Stephenson

31. CAPTAINS OF THE CIVIL WAR, by William Wood

32. THE SEQUEL OF APPOMATTOX, by Walter Lynwood Fleming

V. The Intellectual Life

Two volumes follow on the higher national life, telling of the nation's great
teachers and interpreters:

33. THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION, by Edwin E. SloSSOIt

34. THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, by BUSS Perry

VI. The Epic of Commerce and Industry

The sixth sequence is devoted to the romance of industry and business,
and the dominant theme is the transformation caused by the inflow of
immigrants and the development and utilization of mechanics on a great
scale. The long age of muscular power has passed, and the era of mechanical
power has brought with it a new kind of civilization. Eight volumes:

35. OUR FOREIGNERS, by Samuel P. Orth

36. THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE, by Ralph D. Paine

37. THE AGE OF INVENTION, by Holland Thompson

38. THE RAILROAD BUILDERS, by John Moody

3f. THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS, by BurtOrt J. HfttdHfk

40. THE ARMIES OF LABOR, by Samuel P. Orth

41. THE MASTERS OF CAPITAL, by John Moody

42. THE NEW SOUTH, by Holland Thompson

VII. The Era of World Power

The seventh sequence carries on the story of government and diplomacy
and political expansion from the Reconstruction (1876) to the present day,
in six volumes:

43. THE BOSS AND THE MACHINE, by Samuel P. Or/A

44. THE CLEVELAND ERA, by Henry Jones Ford

45. THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE, by Solon J. Buck

46. THE PATH OF EMPIRE, by Carl Russell Fish

47. THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND HIS TIMES, by Harold Howland

48. WOODROW WILSON AND THE WORLD WAR, by Charles Seymour

VIII. Our Neighbors

Now to round out the story of the continent, the Hispanic peoples on
the south and the Canadians on the north are taken up where they were
dropped further back in the Series, and these peoples are followed down
to the present day:

49. THE CANADIAN DOMINION, by Oscar D. Skelton

50. THE HISPANIC NATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD, by William R. Shepherd

The Chronicles of America is thus a great synthesis, giving a new projec
tion and a new interpretation of American History. These narratives are
works of real scholarship, for every one is written after an exhaustive
examination of the sources. Many of them contain new facts; some of them
— such as those by Rowland, Seymour, and Hough — are founded on inti
mate personal knowledge. But the originality of the Series lies, not chiefly
in new facts, but rather in new ideas and new combinations of old facts.

The General Editor of the Series is Dr. Allen Johnson, Chairman of the
Department of History of Yale University, and the entire work has been
planned, prepared, and published under the control of the Council*
Committee on Publications of Yale University.

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

143 ELM STREET, NEW HAVEN
522 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
BERKELEY

Return to desk from which borrowed.
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

safll

LU

3Jun'6llE

JUN 6 196
I3May'63BB

JUL 1 8 1963

CD

9 196520

JUN 9 1965 fcEC'DLD
NO/ 2 9 -65 -8 AM

LD 21-100m-7,'52(A2528sl6)476

Y.B 63980

M84933

— --1 •• • w

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY